


Vampire in July

by TheBibleSalesman



Series: Pieces [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Oasis (Overwatch), Soldier Enhancement Program, Team Talon (Overwatch)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-07-31 09:07:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20112613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBibleSalesman/pseuds/TheBibleSalesman
Summary: var pt = Oasis, 1 year after Recall;var r = ("The Reaper is an extremely volatile mercenary, a ruthless and remorseless killer responsible for terrorist attacks across the world. He has fought in many armed conflicts in the last decades, showing no loyalty to any cause or organization.");var s = ("Long before she took up the alias "Sombra," ░░░░░░ was among the thousands of children who were left orphaned in the aftermath of the Omnic Crisis. With much of her country's infrastructure destroyed, she survived by utilizing her natural gifts with hacking and computers.");def vampireinjuly();if (r & s & pt = TRUE);then { A horror unfolds beneath the desert sun. }





	1. All That Glitters

The water around the Oasis is full of eyes. Sparkling, twisting, networking into one deep purple mind. Glass corneas split in the sun, reflecting everything in the sky and in the tower. Bloodshot from the sand that drifts on the wind, these are the eyes of a fly on the wall of the world.

She watches the rough sketch of a man crawl from the shadows of blooming ivy quilts to the shadows of plastic benches and palms. He reaches the laboratory and blue streamers are dancing over the flower-stricken gate. Horseshoe halos illuminate his human outline as he erects himself upright and steps inside. When the door panel hangs open behind him, he looks across his shoulder.

But he cannot see her. His eyes have been replaced. There are only clots of DNA there now, and the red glow of a protein fire.

He passes from the atrium into the blue workshop where students of science persevere on the caffeine steam from their Kọfị Aromo cups. They do not look at him. The rubber crunch of his combat boots beneath the LED-ribbed diamond vaults of the ceiling fails to stir a single goggled eye. She guesses that they have been instructed not to look. _If you are not blind you will die._ Another piece of her argues that maybe they really do not notice, that their floating microscopes and sterilized equations prove too entrancing, that he is a ghost. But what does that make her?

The machines are the only ones besides her that see him. Bobbling airborne submarines, they ferry stoppered vials from one end of the lab to the other, they spin carousels around a suspended glob of nanofluid, and they float extra high to clear his tall black head. They see him, but only with their lenses. One attempts to admit him to its records with a sweep of its blue scanner light, but the datapoint prints out blank. She doublechecks, but it’s not a dynamic interpretation error in her program. It’s hardcode.

At the back of the lab, a private corridor slides open for him.

The gallery is blue with white stitches. There are many keyhole-shaped doors. He chooses the one at the end, and the chromed lips of a mouth turned on its side part for him. Again the paneling loiters open like a lifted skirt for several breaths after he marches through.

Here the walls course around the room clear as atmosphere. She forgets herself, walking ahead of him, turning in the filtered blue sunrise without a shadow. The lake looks up at her from just outside. Skiffs with leaf-shaped tails creep over the water like mites. A massive glass column haunts the center of the room.

Moira O’Deorain, the Minister of Genetics, stands above the lake. Her reflection fragments in the curving hologlass. She’s an early patch of night in her fading blue cloth. Her sleeves are full of stars. The table in front of her is the color of her own pale skin, and the veins that run beneath it.

She remains still when shoeless feet pad around her easterly flank, but when the iron boots clunk past the west face of the glass column and pause behind her, she rises from her work. Her turquoise holofilms close, eliminating the last bit of contrast with the quavering hot red of the distant desert. She turns around and her graceful sleeves pin back against her elbows like folding cricket legs. Sunrise pours around her. Winks of metal and sketches of neon across her face only further the suggestion of a jellyfish standing tall and completely still in the water. Her crowned head tips down at her visitor.

“Gabriel,” she sighs tunefully. “Right on time. And you followed procedure like I asked. It is strange,” and she pauses, a blue eye and a red eye bright on him. His breath fills the void in a raspy ventilated clatter. “At times it is difficult to get a person to behave as directed of their own will,” she proposes.

“The numbered list probably wasn’t necessary,” he grunts. He’s squinting in the sunlight. He can’t see how it’s all made of pixels.

“I assure you it is,” Moira tuts. “No one walks these hallowed grounds without permission.” She unveils a hand bursting with purple capillaries towards the glass column. “We’ll proceed the same as last time.”

He twists around the column perimeter and the fly must retreat because the Reaper is coming and his reflection on the glass circles to where she is standing and watching them both. His snarl goes right up her ears:

“And that will net a different result?” He stares at himself in the double-layer of glass as it bisects its flawless curve to open for him. He drags something from his chest and dispenses it to a waiting specimen tray with a jeweled clamor. She can’t see over the bulky, pointed fan of his back.

The Reaper takes down his cowl and yanks away his cloak one shoulder at a time. The metal chunks embedded in the back _pop _as they detach from his spine, and without that controlling stripe the rest of the belts and Kevlar roll together into a nanomechanical mush that oozes off his blue-gray legs. Moira clears her throat and taps a hologram button to open a grate under his feet.

He places a hand on his mask. “It’s been _years_.”

“Well, a lot has changed since we started,” Moira smiles.

“It’s been years since that, too.” Reaper pulls the mask off and strings of reddish semifluid break away with it. The mask joins the treasure pile in the specimen tray. At fifteen seconds without his nanomachines, as he climbs through the glass, his legs cave in a couple soggy cracks. He drops onto the metal platform in the center of the column and his shoulders bruise translucent across the walls. A few wisps of him cut off as the see-through door closes, and as they rise through the sunlight, they starve out of existence.

Moira steps away from her worktable for the first time since he entered. She retrieves a blue vial from an icebox floating in the middle of paradise’s panorama. Frost spits out after her when she squeaks the door shut. She cycles around the ring of consoles barricading the column and upends her glittering crystal into a port on one of them, then spends a minute typing on the attached keyboard.

“Seems some protein is in order,” she reflects as she confirms the program. Her eyes clip across the pile of hazy broken bones inside the tube. “The algae farm will provide.”

Reaper jerks up straight, purple cottage cheese pumping in his chest, the pats of burnt gray skin floating across his surface receding into underlying cords of oily black muscle. “Come now,” Moira chides him. “Surely you did not believe humans were _required?” _

Her hands glide together in an upside-down steeple before her abdomen as Reaper slumps back against the column wall. “You must excuse me,” she pleads, grave with modesty. “I need to ensure the routing pipes are clear of contaminants before I feed you. So often the maintenance of such structures is left to our students, some of whom seem to take their holiday breaks most seriously. But all students have uses beyond their chores, at least.” She grins in through the glass. “I will just be a moment.”

The lab doors exit Moira in an orderly whisper and click. A bubble pokes through the blue vial as it begins to drain. Drops of liquid condense high above Reaper’s bowed head and streak down the column glass.

Sombra releases her pixels in time with her exhale, basking in the cool feather that floats down her skin as the light touches it again. She stands feet apart, hands readied off her hips as her shadow lances across Reaper’s face. His head rises in time to see her drag her wired nails down the console beside the quarter-empty vial.

Just as Sombra graces the lab with the full view of her powerful limbs and her curl of dyed hair, security drones encore her outside, dropping their cloaks as they transmit their all-clears for the hour. They undulate in symmetric red chains, individual nodes covered in eyes and wind stabilizers. Sombra’s violet lips pull apart as she sees not a lake but a pond behind a little church, where an E-54 automaton sits inert and the dragonflies make circles of each other above. And there are other things in the water too, aren’t there?

Not any among the drones’ hundreds of pink lenses dilate at her as she stands in the suggestion of daylight. To them the lab is an oblique-walled fortress spattered in salmon diamonds. Laughing in the stale air, Sombra strolls over to the dolly cart where the specimen tray awaits. One by one the security drones wink back to invisibility, none the wiser. Reaper’s eyes follow her. Fresh pink sutures hatch down his legs.

Sombra’s hands descend to the skull guarding the rest of the tray’s valuables. Reaper props himself up on the column window. The holes in his chest mist the glass. Sombra plucks the skull high, its strigiform halo falling over her face. Iridescent wires throb around the inside. Nanomachines imitate circuitry, construct circular synthesizer platelets in the cheek hollows. She sniffs, but it’s all lifeless machine.

She lays the mask aside on the dolly and peers into the specimen tray to see what else Reaper left behind.

It resembles the catgut of a databank: glimmering, electric, full of serial numbers and chrome letters. Her purple eyes flash all over the actionable microcosms on the surface, shifting focuses on a scale of milliseconds. Her paws crook up and her thumbs grind circles on the sides of her fingers.

Sombra swoops into the chain wiring and pulls out the pieces of Reaper’s dead heart.

A winged outline smashes into the glass beside her face.

Her claws turn to water and some of her captives drop back into their clunky silver boat. Crushed, bleeding fingers gnaw at the barrier keeping Reaper from her plump cheek. He shouts at her. Without his mask it is the wooden boom and creak of a haunted house. It is the voice of the priest at the little church lying on his cushionless cloister bench, death creeping over him by hours and days instead of finding him in a single blissful gasp. The air too is a thing Reaper needs to eat to get any purchase from. Sombra spies teeth within that smoking black mouth. From out here she can’t tell if they spiral down and down into some abyssal gullet.

“Careful papi,” she catches her breath, looking up the stalwart column. “You’ll break the lab equipment.” He still bellows, but the glass is thick. More crows than words slam on the wall between them. “Did you think you could leave me behind?” she snaps back at him.

Blue chemical drips onto Reaper’s scratching fingers and loops neon down his skeletal wrist. He rocks away from the barrier, silent, his gaze on the cargo eclipsing from her hands. Smoke drains from his mouth until the remaining eggshell of his skin pockets inward and clumps to the steel plate.

Swampy bubbles cough beneath Sombra’s feet. When she looks, it’s just the decomposed metal and leather of his coat sliding around the channel beneath the grate.

The freed shadow roves along the glass red-eyed. He feels at the fat connector piece on the top of the column for gaps. “I’ll put them all back!” Sombra protests, the overflowing chains tolling between her fingers.

She tugs the mass to her chest, a few more pieces tumbling off the sides of her small fingers-- landing safely in the tray. “I just want to look.” Reaper withdraws to the axis of the column, coagulating down behind her once more. “It’s your fault anyway,” she tells him as she sinks to the cold floor above the gently burbling vent. She pulls her knees to her chest. “Thinking you can milk carton me…”

Her implants read the metal in her hands as nanites too, constituted in small rectangular silver tags punched through by ball chains. But unlike the black coat or the red bandoliers coming back new every time, some of the tags are waxen, others too scorched to read. She pushes on the warped corner of one and it cuts right through her glove. Another tag is broken in half and she can’t find the other piece of it. Their collective reflection flashes across her face as she sifts for one with a minority of scars. They sing as they fall down her thighs.

She lifts a candidate into the ruby light pouring from the column. The tag reads:

_FALLAGHER_

_TIMOTHY_

_05 0000 012_

_O NEGATIVE_

_CATHOLIC_

Sombra peers up at Reaper. He’s grown a face again. She wonders if he can’t draw his weapons without the nanos. Useful information…somehow…if she can confirm it. Yellow-lime algae flakes pump from a blind door vent in the column top. When they reach the midpoint, before touching any visible part of him, they suddenly blacken and parch and disperse over him and the platform as lifeless ash. Sombra’s curious pout transforms into wrinkled nostrils and a bared canine tooth.

“Yuck,” she informs him.

His token eyelids only partially shade the red glow as he reads the tag through the solvent smeared all over the glass.

When he doubles over himself, noiseless, Sombra only stares. Something shoves out of the old, jagged seam that runs all the way around his neck, not smoke but an ashen sludge that wells down his front and pools in the bottom of the column. “Hey,” she swallows as his hands bracing on the glass melt into the same gray soup. She throws the tags on the floor and stands up. Pieces of algae dissolve in the fluid that rends its way out of him. She puts her colorful, full-bodied arms against the glass and raps her nails beside the bump of his skull. His head nods downward like the dead can sleep. “Old man!” she demands.

His eyes snap up, not on her but on the laboratory door. Eyes that widen as he issues the toll of an ugly broken bell:

_“Hide.”_

Reaper collapses into a puddle of charred moonlight under the falling algae stars.

Sombra looks at the closed door. She grabs the pile of tombstones and chains off the ground and shoves them back in the tray.

“Gabriel?” a muffle outside the door panel gives her a split-second to disappear.

The panel slides away and she catches a glimpse of the weed on fire that is Minister O’Deorain. The figure vanishes in a perfected blink of smoke. Sombra balls up next to a console and peeps through the hollow skeleton of the blue vial. The door closes slowly on empty air. “I heard a crash,” Moira’s deep voice cozies to the back of her ear. Knees clenching inward, Sombra checks her six.

Moira stands very solid beneath the blue light of the icebox on the other side of the lab. Tugs of black primordium follow her long arms as she collects a pair of gauntlets from the top of the refrigerator and fits them to her mismatched hands. A coiled lavender nail tags one of the salmon switches nubbing out of the holographic wall. Before Sombra’s eyes the view of the lake abates to a concrete white cell. The lights go out.

She shrinks deeper into her crouch, shoulder bracing on the solid reassurance of the console. Her spine jumps as the floor grates gurgle hungrily in the dark. While she readies a blueprint in her flash memory, two square totems heat red at either side of the column. Beneath her ankles the floor ripples like gauzy tar. Spotlights click on in a ring around Reaper’s resting place, and yellow bulbs track the arches of the feed pipes injecting the crownpiece. Blue holograms lurch to life across the consoles, opening helix diagrams and bobbing status lines.

Moira emerges around the column, her footsteps slaps of water on sand. Her hands and her gauntlet cables sway from her raised wrists. She stops in front of the dolly.

Two cream fingers droop out of a gelatinous sleeve to the mask lying on the dolly-top. Moira pushes the mask a few centimeters closer to the specimen tray.

She steps away and closes on the glass. Her arms stretch down to their full length, then fold up behind her back.

Gasps of compressed air wash blue solution off the inside of the glass. Algae chunks swirl momentarily in their sluggish descent of the tube, landing pretty as snowflakes on the membrane of the chalky puddle at the bottom. A hump verges out of the ashen liquid and consumes them all. The ghost of Moira’s face lifts along the glass, her holographic interface glinting over her blue eye. The vent to the feeding tube closes.

The UI attached to Moira’s headpiece flickers again and the apex of the column opens wide. A new light, golden and many-armed, descends slowly into the laboratory. Sombra uselessly shades her invisible hand over her eyes. Once she adjusts, she realizes she is looking at the dismembered head of a Caduceus staff, its life-giving fangs rigged with thick cables like Moira’s hands. The chrome teeth quiver and shake and jerk apart at the direction of the implanted cabling, and a stream of gold pours from the Caduceus’s main artery.

Moira bows so close to the glass that her lips leave a heart-shaped imprint. Her body freezes that way, cocked at her subject bathed in gold. Activity graphs light up the curve of the column. Formulae shake their tailfeathers across Moira’s face. But the scientist stares into the depths, unmoving.

Gaseous violet foam spokes from the drying moon crust on the floor plate. The branches of Reaper lattice around the golden beam. He thickens at the bottom of the bubble shield protecting the Caduceus, fountaining to all sides, octopus arms curling over when he hits the glass barrier. The column begins to cloud with nameless black fog.

An ear-setting tone beams out across the lab, pinging off all the walls Sombra cannot see. Her arms dance over her head in the kind of free, unabashed panic someone can only indulge in when no one sees her. Moira’s nearly lipless mouth pulls tight. Her interface blinks and a gush of fluid erupts unceremoniously from the cables around the Caduceus, knocking the nascent blackness back to the bottom of the column. Lingering purple branches lock up in the flood of potion, the fluted skeleton of a saguaro crystallizing behind the glass.

More lights call on as Moira feathers her hands at the consoles on her way to the door. The panel shuffles open at her caress, revealing a man with hornrim spectacles, a pepper beard, a bald spot, and many creases of worry aging his square-jawed face.

“Yes, Minister,” Moira smiles. “You may come in now.” She turns aside with a prim bow, extending her arm. The short man pricks his spectacles back up his nose, tugging his cloak sleeves as he steps inside.

“You took so damn long I thought perhaps he’d made it all the way here.”

Moira raises her head slowly from the bow. She places a hand over the other Minister’s shoulder.

“There is no security breach, Ibrahim.”

He steps out from beneath her reassurances and limps to the column of spiked cider.

“Some of our hardest-working students sought access out for the holiday.” He flaps his hand against his heart. “Some of _my_ students!”

“Aren’t the hardest-working of them still here?” Moira asks as she joins him. Ibrahim frowns up at her, the wingbeats of his hand slowing.

“Al-Zahabi’s grandmother became ill,” he mutters down at his chest.

“Ah, I wondered why he was not joining you today. Could he not simply bring her here?”

“She’s too sick to travel. He-- his family is poor. Ar-Rutbah, that water treatment dump in the mountains the Vishkar took over, you know it? He was born there.”

“Perhaps he ought to have considered his family finances the first problem he needed to investigate, prior to matters of biology,” Moira suggests. “Based on how difficult the issue seems to be for most people, it would have been a worthy challenge.” Sombra grits her teeth.

“I don’t think you understand.” Ibrahim’s bushy brows crush down his forehead, shadowing his brown irises. “_I_ told him to take that particular access. I knew it wouldn’t be crowded despite the date. Do you see? It’s like I sent him…”

“Do you believe Al-Zahabi is a scientist?” Moira inquires, and Ibrahim germinates crow’s feet in real-time as he stares at her.

“Yes."

Moira’s smile softens ever further, cream and strawberry.

“Then there is nothing to worry about, Minister Hassoun. He will approach the situation with an observant mind and generate a logical hypothesis as to what would happen to him should he step off the boat. In the face of overwhelming supporting evidence…he will turn back.”

Ibrahim’s eyes glass beneath his spectacles. He smiles even as one of his silk-gloved hands squeezes at a fist.

“You will be rectifying the situation?”

Moira stretches her spine, shoulders rocking up one side to the other in brief bony excess.

“An appropriate requisition has already been filed,” she grins. Ibrahim sighs through his nose, and starts pulling in some of the holograms scattered across the column face. Moira draws closer, fingers working at the air. “Truly I regret Al-Zahabi’s absence today. Reaper has expressed further misgivings with our rate of progress. And as you once told me, collaboration is key to modern science...”

“It’s not as if Al-Zahabi has grown beyond my own expertise. Not even half the paper count I had at his age.” Ibrahim tunes his spectacles down his nose as he studies one of the holos. Moira hovers behind him.

“So, did you have any new ideas? You and he were entertaining novel proteopathies last time we spoke.”

“Well.” Ibrahim clears his throat, needlessly adjusting his glasses again. “Nothing publishable. That would be an issue specific to this case, not the broader goal. It’s a process. I’d kill for more data.” He holds his arms out to the span of the column.

“I see.” Moira leaves him and attends one of the consoles. The taps of her fingertips on the keyboard jiggle the console metal against Sombra’s shoulder. “Then I’ll draw some samples and we’ll get to work.”

“Where the case is inconsistent, we’ll be traditional. It will yield results for us,” Ibrahim grumbles. “In time.”

Sombra records the hours they spend lurking on stools beside hulking microscopes, and she streams the machines’ readouts to her own databanks. The Minister of Biology lightens up faster than she expects, cracking his own miserable jokes since Moira offers none. While their backs disavow the column, Sombra stands beside it, watching tiny flagella sprout off the purple growth inside.

The room is windowless, so notification of the hour comes from Ibrahim’s audibly wrinkling stomach. He checks the chrono on his wrist. Moira’s hands spread wide, imploring, but he shakes his head. “We’ve got enough samples to occupy us till Summer. Send EDTA-18 through 70 to the tower.” He departs, leaving Moira to finish loading fluids and crayon-stained chunks into white tray suitcases.

“It was a beautiful disassociation,” Moira tells Reaper later, as he stands out of the draining amnion. “I took photos. Would you like to look?” The column door swings open and Reaper steps down to the floor, swiftly pairing the bone mask to his face. “I wonder if you are still the one reconstituting,” Moira poses as she hands him a towel.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he snarls as he reassembles himself from the specimen tray and calls the nanomachines from the grate in the floor to his back. Moira scratches her chin.

“Maybe it is more of a philosophical question,” she admits. “To ask if the electrochemical impression conjured by your new brain is sufficiently like the one previously abandoned to qualify as ‘you’.” She chuckles, “After all, the DNA is quite clear.”

“If you’ve got such a read on it, why don’t you fix it?” Reaper demands as he flexes a line of steel teeth into place over his fingertips.

“It’s a process,” Moira murmurs. Reaper stomps away to the door. “Besides, your body has adapted well to the changes. You’re quite stable.” He freezes in the open doorway, talons tightening so hard into his palms that a drop of his own black blood smokes off the side of his thumb. Sombra scoots into his shadow. “There is one item that would be of great assistance to our understanding,” Moira calls from her place by the emptied column. The bill of Reaper’s mask turns a profile over his shoulder and stares through Sombra at her.

Moira smiles. “Another sample from the same program. Especially if it happens to be alive upon delivery. Vivisection is more informative than autopsy, as you well know.” Reaper departs into the blue gallery. Sombra practically holds his coattails. “Nollaig shona daoibh,” Moira calls through the door as it closes. “Same time next year, shall we?”

Reaper returns the way he came, sloughing his outline as he creeps through the low sun. He hovers under benches and plummets down the shade of painted blue waterways until he finds a flowering thicket he can wait for nightfall in.

Sombra wiggles through the brush after him. Thorny stems tear away patches of her camouflage and leaves shake with her passage, falling down Reaper’s hood as she joins him in the hollow where the plant roots to the garden bed. Their thicket abuts a wall a dozen meters off the ground, part of a decorative shelf inset over a university courtyard. Reaper leans his shoulders and head into the smooth, warm ceramic, mask craning at Sombra as she dispenses the remains of her cloak.

“Milk carton…?” he crackles, and she takes a moment to grin at those words, from that face. The silhouettes of the leaves paint his skull in military camo, but the posture is all wrong for a soldier: wrist bracing over a bent knee, other leg relaxed straight across the soil.

“Like when you leave your kid with a chocolate milk to keep her occupied, and go off to do whatever it is you really wanted to do,” she explains, craning a professorial finger at him. He imitates her, a claw rising-- exceeding her angle to point straight up.

“The drones,” he reports. Three of the globular tomato snakes decloak right over their heads, peering hard at Sombra with a hundred eyes each.

“Don’t worry about them.” She waves her hand and the drones turn away, dispersing to festival streamers over the lake. “They don’t see an-y-thing they aren’t meant to.”

“They don’t play here, Sombra.”

“I don’t play either,” she growls. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This is what you deserve for thinking you can just drop me off somewhere and disappear.”

“The Oasis Mist Garden is one of the most exclusive shopping districts in the world.” She can almost see the chill of him frosting the leaves. “Even the university grounds have higher value targets than a single lab. They built an entire tower to hoard data.” His claw extends at the ziggurat pointing to the universe just across the courtyard.

“Yeah…” Sombra closes her arms around her ribs. “But listen, I have an idea.” Reaper turns completely away from her, looking out a gap in the vegetation at the lake and its little golden boats.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

“Uh, you brought me.”

“You said you needed something to do.” His mask comes back, face-on at her, his voice the noxious bubbling of a cauldron. “Why were you at the base? Don’t you have assignments?”

“I multi-task.” She weakly flips a couple fingers out from the defensive coil of her arms. “You’re supposed to say ‘what’s your idea, Sombra?’”

“Did something happen in Dorado again?” He sits forward off the wall. “Did someone happen to see your face during the failure in Russia…and live?” He runs silent as Sombra investigates the irrigation lines under her feet. “Does the town need to be secured?” he thunders, skull lowering towards her.

She frees her arms from the hug she gives herself and shows him the black palms of her gloves.

“No. That isn’t necessary,” she insists, biting her own pouty lip. The mask drifts closer. She hears him take a breath. “I found S.E.P. data for you,” she interrupts him.

The holes in the mask flicker with red light as something rearranges behind them.

A new drone shoves the white nucleus of its body-- the size of a streetcar --over the ledge. They both scramble out of the thicket, Sombra to the side, Reaper striding right through the thorns to the front.

They emerge just in time for the drone’s ten silken arms to prise open and spritz them both with lemon water.

Sombra sniffs her elbow. She laughs. The drone throbs in place atop its pulsar rings, the blue lens on the front of its shell dilating a shutter as it rotates between the two of them. She probes the CPU. It’s old, pre-Crisis, even though it’s lodged behind that pristine white hull. A weird place to cut corners. Did a contractor dare deceive the great minds of Oasis? The drone is a gardener, or not even that. The real work of keeping the Oasis alive happens under their feet, but it’s the drone that makes all the flowers sparkle at sunset.

“_Fwoo…oop!_” it bleats as it calculates its mistake, and Sombra is laughing again as its scandalized bass radiates through her chest. It has the twisted button-eyed body of a lab rabbit and the voice of an elephant caged at a zoo. Trailing hand towels from the storage lockers on its sides, four of the drone’s arms descend to her face and coat and pat her dry. Reaper glares at her as two other arms polish his mask and she points at him, laughing behind her hand.

He swats the helping arms away with the shotgun he already had drawn. The drone jets back from them with a contortion of its many limbs, apologetic whistles fizzling.

Sombra’s remaining giggles die to her surprise. She did not expect a gardener to know what a gun was. But its lens flashes white and it whirls away around the side of the genetics lab. Reaper’s whole head tracks after it, drops of dew cascading off his hood. The gun clumps to the soil and dissipates. Loose flowers skip off the thicket head.

Sombra tiptoes along the ledge, around Reaper, and she crouches down on the outcrop of the garden bed facing the lake. He joins her in unanimous rejection of the thicket’s protective atrium, stooping over at her side.

“S.E.P. dossiers are paper. They were never digitized,” he rumbles.

“Like what Moira has in her lab,” Sombra agrees. “But did you know they were tracking you too?” She glances at the strip of exposed gray skin on his bicep. “Must be DNA-coded.” Her eyebrows dig at her face. “Or something.”

Sunset in Oasis is green. Green on their layered coats. Green jeweling in the water droplets running off their legs. Green like a mold growing over Reaper’s mask.

“Your price?” he asks.

“Easy.” Sombra snaps her fingers at an island on the lake. A Ferris wheel's blinding colors turn double on the water. Blimps trail ropes of blinking lights beneath the shadow of the tower.

“Then go,” Reaper snorts.

“But I mean…” She twirls her purple nail up, around and around, magicking her idea to the physical realm. “I want a date.”

“Sombra.”

“I don’t get out much,” she pitches her voice higher, and with a curl of her lip adds, “It’s Christmas!”

“Not that it matters here,” he scoffs.

“Do you want the info or not?”

“How exactly do you propose I attend?” he simmers. Sombra answers in a lazy shrug, making sure to lift her arms at the elbows and flatten her palms out to either side. Gets him to stare.

“I don’t know. You’re the creative one!” Big eye roll for her audience. “From what I hear, they all used to follow your needle.” She affects her palm along her face, glancing down herself with a purple flash of eyelids. Her fingertips sink into the round of her cheek. “But you aren’t the only one who would need a change of attire.” She rotates her hand, putting shadows across her eyes.

“You can’t be seen anywhere?” he sneers.

“Some places are safer than others. Monaco seems pretty secure. Venice? Not so much.” She grins, flapping her hand at the green reflection of the city curdling across the lake. “Here? I’m not really sure…” She mocks out the shrug again, and Reaper pulls his face away from her. “The pressures of living the high life.”

“Is that what you are doing in Talon?” he asks tightly. “Living it up?”

“Sometimes my boss even takes me to ‘the most exclusive shopping districts in the world’.” Sombra dangles her arms to her knees, wrists hanging off the points, a luminescent miniature of the man in the black cloak. Her eyelids shade the purple of her gaze a bit. “You should have let Widow out of the ship. Then we could really have some fun.”

At the corner of her vision Reaper’s silhouette lurches off his own frame towards her. He resets as she twists to face him, her hands up and curling, her face a grimace. “Was it something I said?” The ledge is suddenly a hair’s width beneath her toes, the drop to the concrete water infinite.

Reaper inhales, that familiar holey rattle patching the end of it. With creaks of old tin and leather he turns up his hand to her, showing her the black pit of his palm. His talon caps contract around the edges. Sombra’s arms decline from their cowl against her face. “You’re scary sometimes,” she murmurs.

His mask tilts at an angle that should be uncomfortable for the head beneath.

“In what way?”

“Well not the way I think you try to be,” she smiles, mostly for herself, as she touches a couple fingers to the offered ink. The skin of his glove is taut, a firm bank of metacarpals stretching underneath. “But maybe you aren’t as regimented as you would like.”

“People behaving in ways you haven’t planned out for them bothers you,” he rephrases. Sombra blows out a wordless puff and shoves the rest of her fingers into his nest of claws. She raises chipped brows at him. The sun droops, and the columns of the flower thickets hide them like any two crows in conspiracy. She hasn’t seen a single pigeon since they arrived that was not in a cage. Despite the sordid jungle flush of the gardens, no bugs have come nibbling at her neck. Maybe they are too far out in the desert.

Reaper hesitates.

“You want to wait till it’s completely dark?” she prods him. He actually searches for the sun, though he won’t find it in Oasis. All they have is the twilight suggestion that the star still exists, and the jade vibrations of the city on the lake, a beacon to all the world’s fireflies. Farther out, beyond the artificial waters and all the eyes, the undisturbed desert pickles orange in the starless sunset.

Reaper’s palm slurps down on Sombra’s waiting cloth fingertips. A congealed batter of glove and hand stitches onto her knuckles. She squints at the abyss as it inhales up her arm, the breath she was holding falling out as she presses her lips together. Reaper’s stain gnaws her sleeve and bleeds into her collar, ingesting the nanotic knit.

His other arm tears off black and limp to the ledge porcelain as he concentrates on her. His lifeless fingers dissolve to an oily pool that adheres to the toes of her leggings. Sombra rises to her feet. She gives herself a twirl as ebony smoke wreathes around her body, fanning out behind her in a three-petaled cloak. “I knew you’d figure it out,” she chuckles. The jet fabric of her new leggings abruptly adheres to the ledge tile, stopping her spin on the edge of the lake. “Hey!”

Reaper surfaces from his crouch next to her. She can see through him, his mask buoyed on a wisp of darkness. She tries to take his face, only to stop at the sight of her own bare brown hands outstretching towards the night. “Um, could I have my gloves?” The edges of her new sleeves foam, split into pieces, and reach back up for her fingers. “You know what, it’s fine,” she mutters, waving both hands behind her head at her spine. “Just try not to gum up anything in the back.”

She feels him resettle around the modern support prosthetic verging out of her back, a smaller and shinier edition of his own nanite housing. He doesn’t smell bad like she thought-- more leather, less blood porridge. His perch on her is cool enough to pebble her skin. She makes grabby claws at his mask and it bisects into pieces: a brow, a cheek, the owlish point of the jaw, all webbed by a bony slurry of nanomachines. The partitions turn in the air like a magic trick and descend to her face.

Sombra extracts the plate into her hands while it’s still reconfiguring. “Calavera,” she grins as synthesizer panels indent the cheeks. The unmasked Reaper left beside her coils down and fills her shadow on the ground. “You made it more girly,” she teases. A worm of black vapor lifts from her collar and pushes into the mask’s synthesizer input.

“It’s your emblem,” Reaper’s stormy decant vibrates off the plate. Sombra touches the skull to her face, blinking out of the protective lenses over the eye sockets.

“You rounded it,” she accuses with a smile, testing the stickiness of her heel and finding herself able to walk again. All her clothing is black. She juts her thumb beneath the hanging panel of calavera teeth and paces it across her lower lip. “Hm…”

With a little pulling she coaxes the elements of her original nanotextiles out of Reaper, arranging them across the surface of her cloak in silver filigrees on the edges and chevrons of cherry light at the lapels. Along the deeper layers she folds in some complementing sangria. Then she lights up the inside of the hood she pulls over her hair, along with her arms and legs, in her favorite luminescent violet. “Perfect,” she rasps.

“Try not to make yourself too noticeable,” the calavera groans as she hops down the garden ledges to the deserted courtyard.

“You’re the boss.” Sombra smirks as she jogs to the monorail station.


	2. Fly Town

The tower of Oasis is inescapable. Even as the monorail flies away, the reflection of endlessly stacking polygons points after it. Sombra rests her calavera on the window, listing up at the honeycomb spire. A beehive of unfinished plastic teeth mummify a wiry antenna at the top. Aircraft alarms rotate on suspended cranes like warding eyes. Drones buzz in the upturned construction spotlights.

She’s the only one in her car, but it’s not fair to say she’s alone. Her shadow is crawling on the seats around her.

Academics color the next compartment down with their turquoise robes. When she steps off at the island, tourists from the city center pile out of the train’s other mouths. They wear the sunrise of the desert, mock-ups of Oasis style with flowery knit sleeves and folds of silk trailing off their hips. Somehow they already smell like popcorn and baby powder. Family groups exchange phones with each other so that every soul can get in every picture. The tourists vogue on the station platform while the Ferris wheel stretches high at their backs. Sombra deletes herself from the backgrounds of the subsequent social media posts.

She stands beside the wall of the ramp down to the festival, thinking maybe it isn’t necessary. She does have her mask. It’s the whole point of a mask. Her hand grazes the top of the wall, only to recoil as her naked skin hits pebbled stone. A couple kids shove past her back even though the walkway is broad enough for a car. The controlled 30-Celsius breezes rumple her coat, sliding into her back through the breathing textile. She alone can see the cloaked eyes watching every alley of the festival and the waters beyond. She’s got a pretty good map of the place already.

“What is it?” Smoke curtains out of the calavera’s cheeks. Reaper prickles restlessly on her shoulder blades. Sombra gawks at a benign _HAPPY HOLIDAY! _banner uplifted on two green poles over the festival entrance. She checks the lettering twice-- the _S_ is definitely missing. “Do you see a threat?” She tries her hand on the guano-colored wall again, scratching her palm flat on the concrete.

“It’s nothing,” she tells Reaper. She turns around, planting her elbows on the wall and dragging a phone from one of her new pockets. “Smile,” she says as she aims the camera lens at herself. Behind her the desert’s final red streaks peter out across the top of the wheel.

Heat lightning pops overhead, veining the green hematoma of the night. Sombra hikes out of the shadows into the flash of the festival and discovers she is a dot of paint in the portrait of a crowd. She flows among strangers past hologram palm trees and Bactrian camel skeletons until she catches the fry oil and chicken stink of the food stalls. Her lips purse. Reaper withers a sigh. Sombra squeezes between competing 6-D sensory booths to reach a line of striped, smoky tabletops. Turning a blank holographic card off her wrist to the omnic server yields a sippy cup full of iced tea and a tray loaded with fries and sugar.

She climbs onto a souvenir shop to eat, crossing her legs and leaning over the side. Kids filter out of the shop with plastic beakers and Build-Your-Own-Drone kits. _OASIS _lights up in a rainbow on chests and backs all over the street. When the inevitable jalapeño-crusted onion coil falls on Sombra’s thigh, black cells pile up and toss it over the roof corner to the ground.

“What parts of these things do you like, boss?” she asks as she nibbles through an unfamiliar square cookie, saffron dust sparkling down her chest and dissolving to ashes on her dark clothing.

“The music,” he rasps. Sombra dumps the rest of the tray on the store roof and hops down to a wall running the circumference of a hydroponic garden. She rotors out her arms for balance. A mural of the Omnic Crisis and the eventual green birth of the city scrolls by under her tip-toe.

“Let’s see who’s playing tonight.” She can hear the snare drums deeper down the beach. She drops to a hexagon cobble walkway where streetlamps draw perfect moons.

A little girl waits for her in the light, a finger hanging against her pudgy lip. Sombra’s lazy kick-steps come to a halt with the two of them standing on opposing ends of a white circle. The girl, completely without permission, totters forward in her belted green dress and holds out her hands. Sombra retracts hers under her cloak, peering around the walkway.

There: two responsible adults in the blue star robes of Oasis scientists gravitate towards the lamplight. Parents, coming up a dune from the waterside on elegant sequined sandals, giggling low together in Arabic. One of the women smiles and nods to Sombra. She wonders if they are mistaking her for a street performer.

Her skull twists back down at the kid, who keeps coming at her, who isn’t slowing down. Sombra brushes a hand out from beneath her black layers. She glances at her own skin and the solid sleeve edge cutting off at her wrist. It occurs to her that she has dealt with dumb kids like this before. The girl’s hands reaching up to her are the same color as her own.

She smiles deep and takes the little fingers. A single sway of her glowing feet and the girl catches on, dancing a concentric circle with her. Sombra sashays in and out of the lamplight, luminescing every time she enters the shadows. They part in laughter, and she crouches to poke the kid’s nose. The women advance to collect their offspring, murmuring gratitude as they pass. Sombra hangs just out of the spot as she watches them depart together.

She scans the credentials on their phones just to be sure. Reaper is tight on her arms.

Passersby make lanterns down the walkway with their plastic baggies full of holographic fish. Sombra shortcuts off the cobbles, climbing around a wall of sword-leafed hedges to enter the beach promenade.

“Amazing,” an omnic with a red clown nose wired to its faceplate coos as the air explodes with rupturing balloon skins. It reaches over the candy stripe counter to hand her another trio of darts. Sombra misses two out of three. The omnic’s head cranks at the rainbow of untroubled balloons wafting against the corkboard. “Amazing,” it repeats. “You got all three again. Now you can try one more time, for the big prize!”

“Sure,” Sombra grins, and lets the robot drop another handful of darts to her. She jostles them in her bare hand, then leans over the stall barrier and drops them on the ground.

“Amazing!” the omnic exclaims as it bends to gather the darts. Its green wig slips down its indicator lights as it digs for one that rolled under the stall skirt. “You are an excellent shot, miss! And so fast! You can have any prize you like.” Sombra waves her hands at the huge pink MEKA-branded rabbit on the top of the stall and the omnic gets it down for her.

“Now this would have been a milk carton,” she muses to Reaper as she waddles down the promenade, her arms burgeoning with cheap polyester. “Especially if you had let me watch you win it.” She dumps the toy in a bush of pink flowers and ventures out onto the sand.

The night rots black just beyond the veils of passing blimps. Lasers and deer-shaped holograms churn in a pop-up amphitheater to the south. Reaper pinches the inside of her elbow as he rattles the sleeve, shedding stray rabbit hairs. A shiver cracks up her spine and lifts her shoulders. She grinds her toesocks into the sharp opal sand and he finally quits wriggling.

At this distance there’s no telling if the concert is any good. But ahead of her a dance floor made of translucent tile quilts onto the lake. Cartoon arowana swing ribbons in the water beneath stomping dress heels. No more children around. Couples channel off the dance floor to visit a conveniently dense palm garden to the north. And there’s an open bar from elBuffi erupting obsidian from the sand beside rows of picnic tables. Sombra’s tongue touches her upper lip as she studies the spectrum of bottles behind the floating omnic bartender.

Warm, uninhibited voices float to her ears from all over the sand. She strides forward between the picnic tables. Her hands drift out at her sides and her fingers float the wet, hot air like she’s found the current in it. Purple pixels announce her onto the dance floor, spectral bones winging from her extremities. Her skull floats a lot shorter than most of the other dancers’, but they don’t miss the light.

Heavy lab clogs, blue trousers with chemical stains, the scent of liquefied moss; she can tell most of these are post-docs in disguise. Their duck feet display to the tempo of electroswing, trumpets banging across the flashing tiles, keyboard synthesizers whirring cool from the floating speaker set-up. Some of the scientists reason their way to fashion, though it mostly seems to involve baring a lot of skin. Sombra only has her hands exposed, and her smile beneath the calavera teeth.

She crosses another woman she is pretty sure is wearing only feathers-- some that flow in dyed electric freeform, others stitching in riverine patterns across her belly, tightening in a scarf about her long neck. A trio of green pheasant quills wilt out of her tied hair, and bronze curls ripple around the tall statue frame of her face as Sombra passes by. The shine on the woman is an audible thing, the glittering tinsel of an open life. It makes the hair on Sombra’s arms stand up.

She heads to the center of the dance floor and hears other careful footsteps sifting through the crowd after her. Reaper pushes to the surface of the cloak and opens an inconsistent pillar of red lights down her spine. He has more omens screwed wide on the front when Sombra reaches the dead center and pivots to face her worshipper.

Only the feathers swing as the woman stands tall before her, her back to the emerald gleam of Oasis. Metal diagrams embed in her temples, connecting to the smart armlet furled around her left tricep. She removes her glowing lavender cat-eye visor and tucks the folded frame into the wrap around her breasts. With the plastic gone, Sombra can see the glitter shading her eye sockets.

She waits for the next song to coil into its saxophones, turning her calavera away from the woman for as long as it takes for the beat to hit.

Her heel knocks the tile beneath her and the LED tints purple. The feathered woman blinks down. This color isn’t even programmed. On the next bass drop, Sombra double-taps the tile and the entire dance floor takes on her hex. Her newest friend peeps through her own transparent heels as the purple undulates, dot spirals pinwheeling out from Sombra’s tile as she twists her hips into the dance.

The feathered woman laughs. Her brown eyes rise again to meet the calavera’s reddish lenses. She joins Sombra. She throws her shoes in the lake so she can keep up. Her silken glow matches to Sombra’s shadowy body. There are moments where they move in complete sync, two sphinxes daring anyone to stand between them. But mostly they’re grinning, flashing their hands out in little variations on the patterns they know. Sombra’s sweat moistens the back of her neck and she hopes it doesn’t bother Reaper too much.

Not that there is anything he can do about it.

Others nearby catch on with the two of them, pressing in, some awkward, some nuanced, but all brave enough to at least try. Her kind of crowd. They tap and click around her. When Sombra dances, she is silent.

Then comes the meteor hurtling into the heart of the dance floor. He steps in on a single huge stride and sweeps feathers off her feet. He lifts her to the black veil and her eyes flow off Sombra to the starless sky, a glitter in her irises like she somehow perceives the galaxy beyond Oasis. She comes down laughing, waving goodbye over a shoulder in an ugly tan shirt.

Sombra exhales under her mask. She licks the salt off her lips.

Someone else is looking at her now: a black beard in a blue suit jacket and turtleneck, pale gloves hiding his hands, dark pants tailored tight around his legs. The dance floor fades to its default programming as she stares at him. He swallows.

She walks over and leans her studded calavera to his ear.

“I need a drink.”

She lets him talk to the bartender-- and pay --only to find herself holding a glass of benign yellow chill without a hint of drunken aroma to it. He has a copy in his own hand. He catches her goggling down at it.

“Not your taste?”

Sombra heaves her shoulders around a loop.

“I just thought the kids’ games were back over there,” she drawls, jabbing her thumb inland.

“You don’t like those?” he asks, holding out his glove to accept the glass back.

“N-no,” she mumbles, and he smiles. She watches him instruct the bartender on what to add.

“Don’t just pour it in,” he scolds the omnic. “Get the Riedel first. No-- look, just start from the beginning.” The omnic blends a mixer and delivers it to Sombra with a little green umbrella unfolded over the brim.

“So you do know how it works,” Sombra notes. She leaves a centimeter of space between her fingers and the machine’s and takes the glass stem from its hand.

“Thank you for your input sir,” the omnic pipes over her. “I am to use this holiday festival for conditioning my basic functions prior to my induction to regular service--” The young man holds his palm up to the robot’s face and it falls silent, then returns to its other duties.

“A sin is best investigated personally,” he tells Sombra with a little smirk. He follows her lead to the picnic tables, and she picks out a bench corner for them to sit beside each other at, facing the aisle so it’s easy to run.

“With an attitude like that I bet there are some pretty embarrassing private images on your Net account,” Sombra hums. She’s filing through them all as she lines the moist base of her glass to the no doubt expensive rustic tabletop. Her date chuckles uncertainly and sips from his own carbonated beverage. “So what are you?” Sombra peers through her lenses at his trimmed beard and plucked eyebrows. “A professor?”

“A post-doc.” He shrugs a little. “Archaeology.”

“Sounds tame.”

“Guess it depends on how religious you are.”

“I don’t think anyone’s waiting to put my image on their ofrenda.”

The post-doc takes another sip, mulling the drink on his tongue like it is a brew more substantial than a fruit cocktail. Sombra flops her arms in a loose cross over her lap.

“I thought your mask might be an homage,” he says.

“Well I know for a fact that the dead come back to life.” Sombra’s smirk pollutes her voice. Reaper coils at her ribs, but the crushing stops when she rubs at her side.

“Is that so?” the post-doc laughs. He runs his gloved knuckles on the tabletop, glancing at her drink. “You know you don’t really strike me as an academic. What’s your name?” His face softens in the silence that follows his question.

“Badia,” Sombra proposes, and the post-doc’s mouth relaxes open. His eyelashes flutter, just like a reindeer. “Or maybe Sameh?” She tilts her head. “No, not that one. Deborah? Tejal? Zuly? Wait…I know.” The post-doc drains what is left of his drink. Sombra cranes at him. “Claire.” She wiggles a finger at his face as she puts the most recent tag on his photosets to use. “Yeah. I’m definitely Claire!”

A tear wells hot from the post-doc’s eye and smears down his stubbled cheek to the trim line of his beard. Sombra's playful finger slows as he swings himself up on his long dress leggings.

“I get it.” He shakes his head. Sombra flashes through the text exchanges between him and Claire. Nothing that would make her cry. No deep-throated _Get out of my life forever! _Just photos and videos, sins and bright spots. As he walks away she still can’t figure out why his face contorts and his eyes waste water in the desert.

“Tame after all,” she curses under her breath. She plucks her drink off the table and dumps it down her thigh. “What do you think?”

It takes a moment for the smoke to bulk around her cheeks and push a translation through the synthesizer.

“I can’t really taste it,” Sombra’s other voice speaks to her.

“Need something meatier?”

“Sugar.”

“Huh?”

“I can always taste the sugar, for some reason.”

“Well this has sugar in it,” Sombra snorts, dropping the glass and its remaining yellow film into the sand. “Cantaloupe, papaya…”

“It’s sweet,” Reaper agrees softly. Sombra clambers off the bench and returns to the bartender.

“Is that a Campanilla?” She points at the bottle on the end of the display, smiling.

Festival lights spangle her departing silhouette. The black lake swarms up the beach to cool her toes with a fake tide. Drops of mezcal dapple the water from the hanging bottle mouth. She walks on the edge of the palm garden and the edge of the music. She is looser now, freer in her spins on one toe, a marioneta made of wood. The heartbeat of the bass jingles the wet sand under her feet.

The garden verges into the water ahead, ending her road in lilypad-shaped planters and vanilla perfume. She clunks onto the alabaster lip of a planter wall, kicking her legs out in an ungainly dog spread. A Masî skiff with golden sails flows onto her peripheral, hovering across the lake like a radioactive fly. Sombra wets her lips again, glancing at the void of the bottle but not quite up to another taste of fire.

“Pathetic,” Reaper chides.

“I just need a minute,” she coughs. “I can drink anybody under the table.” She bares her teeth. “People you trained.”

“You don’t want me to know who that is,” he snarls, drifting looser from her skin now that she’s walked him to an unlit angle of the beach. Sombra pulls the mask off and tips her head all the way back in a swig. She leaves the bottle in the garden dirt behind her. “You don’t act like someone who doesn’t get out much,” Reaper throbs through the mask by her hip, belts of smoke snaking off her waist and through the eye-holes. “You seem to enjoy the company.”

“I thought scientists were supposed to be logical,” she sighs, leaning on her hands, wrapping her fingers against the cold, exposed stone. “That they couldn’t cry.”

“They recognize the human brain isn’t equipped to solve problems in an efficient manner,” Reaper grumbles. “So they invented a process to get around it. It doesn’t change anything about their heads being full of the same mush as anybody else’s.”

“Well…I guess that means they’re bad company like anybody else. You know, I don’t think Moira can cry.” Sombra grins at those silent red lenses, “It’s not like I’m alone now anyway. You’re still here. You like dancing?”

“Folklórico,” he volunteers. The distant music alters tunes mid-beat. Dancers sway apart in vague, befuddled bouncing. An alarmed host in a green tux runs over to the speaker controls. “They don’t know what that is here,” Reaper bites at the air.

“Unless the stuff old people do outside church counts, neither do I.”

“Of course it counts--” He pauses. Sombra's jubilance shines out of her face. “I’m not teaching you,” Reaper growls.

“I’d need one of those frilly china poblanas,” she imagines aloud. “Moira wouldn’t look very good in one. Would Widow?” Reaper doesn’t answer. “We should get you a hat!”

“Are you done?”

“Fourth grade.” Sombra clears her throat. “The first time you and your partner won the inter-state dance competition. But you kept going every year after that. You couldn’t be stopped, not by puberty or whatever weird stuff happens in high school.” She claps her hands at her cheeks. “So many reaction vids! And you were always champion with the same person at your side. But she wasn’t the one you married…”

“Dancing isn’t about love,” he corrects her again. Sombra pulls her lips to one side, eyebrows a challenge, but all Reaper says is, “What’s your point?”

“I know everything,” she declares.

“You don’t know how to dance the jarabe tapatío.”

Her jaw sets as she stares down at the red eyes of the calavera. Her brain fires off a brief image of her throwing it into the lake. All she does is pull her feet up the planter wall into a more comfortable pose, hunkering gargoyle against the waterfront. Scaly, prehistoric succulents nest around her, heavy leaves dipping into the black mirror beyond the wall.

“Widowmaker was a dancer too,” she barbs Reaper, and he supplies the expected knots all over her hide. She flinches, her lips setting-- not a smile, because somehow his reaction does not curry the laughter she hoped for.

“You have something for me,” he commands, a thorny hand tiding off her wrist, the saber glint of claws beckoning in the air over her soft, limp fingers. Black puppet strings stretch between his apparition and her arm. She grinds her tongue on the sharp of her teeth.

“You didn’t like any of this, Gabe?”

“Why would I like it?”

Sombra lifts her hand and purple holoscreens circle around her in the vegetative dark. Individual panels still bear the artifacts of her journey to this moment: dot light maps of Oasis security drones, a schematic of Moira’s lab. Sombra clears those phantoms to the side and pulls the Earth into the central holo. Like the Recall map, the Soldier Enhancement Program data filters in as bright stars across wilted, dried out continents. Unlike the Recall program, Sombra can’t freely open dossiers by poking the falling lights. All the subjects are nothing more than their terminal ID numbers.

Reaper slimes up over the back of her skull, a new weight sagging the lip of her hood as he focuses on _76 _several hundred kilometers away. Sombra glances to either side as red eyes spot from the leather surrounding her head. Blood oils out of her sleeve and fills the canals of her palm.

“Can you calm down?” she mutters under her breath.

The liquid evaporates and the bloodshot balls on her hood dwindle in number to two: one high over her temple, the other bobbling in the hood folds on the opposite side. Sombra jabs her cleaned finger to the political outline of Iraq. “We are here,” she drones helpfully, picking the mask up. She holds it in front of her face with both hands so she can look him in the eyes. “All of us.”

She lifts her chin at the cluster of numbers hovering neon at their current position, thick enough that a spider of legend lines is required to highlight all the individual units. Not just _24, _but _12,_ and _3, 17, 20, 8, _and a dozen others.

“Looks like more of them tapped out than I expected.” A shadowy slurry lumps off the nose of Sombra’s hood and pokes at a dot deep in the Antarctic. “How often does this update?”

“The leashes are good and tight.” Sombra pinches the inside of the mask.

“Has anybody else been accessing the satellite?” Reaper’s military mode sounds older than his other voices, wizened, with a cracking throat. She hates this tactical, critical, facts-only tone the most. More than the monster in the tube. She would rather listen to him scream.

“Not really. There was some activity in past years, but it all peters out after _49 _leaves D.C. and joins this, uh, collection.” She points Reaper back to his own reading on the map, the many-faced, overflowing mound.

“Country before brothers,” Reaper scoffs. Without a word of warning he evacuates from her skin, secreting her old clothing into place as he leaves. Goosebumps flight across her after him. Her teeth chatter despite the petri dish heat of Oasis. Her hands creak open around the calavera, and it floats even without her. Reaper’s body bends down next to her on the wall, his crouch lacking hewn detail. His head is a blurring black hole. “Magnify Iraq,” he demands from the rounded skull under the holoscreen.

Sombra nocks her jaw on a propped palm.

“Getting a better look at yourself?”

“Pay attention.” Reaper snatches the mask with the fat unformed caterpillars of his fingers and slops it onto his head, where it assumes its archetypal configuration. He notches a solidifying talon at a single ID in the cloud around his position: _60\. _Sombra expands the Oasis metropolitan fief. Most of the numbers remain sitting in the garden beside her.

_60 _rests a few virtual millimeters off, in the desert beyond the lake.

“Did he follow us?” She recoils from her own map.

“Can you calm down?” Reaper hisses back at her. “What’s in this area?” She obligingly calls down the terrain reliefs.

“Security outpost.” She drags her Oasis systems overlay out of lockdown, buildings lighting up pink. “Just south of the one we used to get in.” She frowns at him. “He’s on your trail.”

Reaper’s mask shifts around at the details of the image.

“Or he was invited.”

He rises off the wall, looking at the skiff glowing with kaftans and tuxedos a dozen meters out. He steps from the garden, the shallow water clouding around the impact of his heavy boots.

Sombra jumps up and catches him by the band of gray skin sticking from his leathery wrappings. The skin is cold, but underneath that are veiny pulses of heat trying to itch back at her.

“I’ve got it, boss,” she offers, dropping down, her legs staining to the knees. She holds onto him, her other hand reaching towards the Masî. His mask follows her straining fingers.

The skiff flips on its trifoil sails, escorting its well-heeled patrons into the water. Arms in expanding spongy sleeves slap wetly in the night, punctuating in coughs and drunken groans. Bathwater sucks and pulls around flailing bodies. Floating bottles roll over and gloss the ripples with the sting of whiskey. Swiveling upright, the cleansed Masî resumes floating a meter off the water, hands that clamber for it slipping off the ultra-polished hull.

A scream parks in the empty night as eyes rise from the lake, dragonfly larvae humping out of the water among human bodies. Red coils budge under grasping hands. Nanomachines pad segments that contact skin. The skiff guests rise out of the water, dangling from unearthly tethers that pull them dripping into the shadows above. The drones ferry them to the lifeguard station beneath the glamorous spin of the wheel.

One of the glistening aquatic units meets with a longer drone that decloaks out of the sky. The two converse in electric waves marked by physical blinks of their many lenses. The lifeguard drone dives back into the water. The security unit floats to the Masî’s prow and the holos across the navigation console synthesize with its crimson wavelength. Sombra redirects the unit with one last tweak of her finger, and it dispenses the boat at their garden shore.

Sombra reduces the jet strength and the Masî bobbles almost flat to the water. Reaper hauls aboard. His arms gnarl back over the side to seize her hipbones and clear her shorter body past the rim. He stomps off to navigation. Sombra dances in place, kicking the lake off her blue leggings.

The golden shimmer of the turning Masî sparks along a bottle of mezcal abandoned in the garden dirt. As the skiff pirouettes into the night, a green drone creeps out from beneath the drooping feathers of the aloes. The drone’s scanner peels across the mezcal bottle. It extends arms from its boxy sides. Framing its manipulators on the bottle’s mouth and tail, it grinds the quantum engine in its back, and the bottle pops into a pile of diamond chunks. The drone ejects a brush from its front end and sweeps the debris into the trash compactor in its base. Drops of alcohol glitter beneath its searchlights as they sink into the soil.

The drone rotates towards its storage compartment at the back of the planter. Its scanner passes the inanimate body of a caterpillar thrown a few centimeters from the bottle wreckage. Reversing its treads, the drone turns around and cleans crumbs of glass off the caterpillar’s tapering red shell. It tries to pick up the body by the tail, but the stinky, waterlogged partitions sag from its manipulator. The front half of the worm slops back to the dirt.

After processing, the drone changes tactics. It scoops the flat surfaces of its manipulators underneath the caterpillar to draw all of its body from the soil at once. It performs a biometric scan to confirm that the bloated halves are deceased, and submits a parasite report to the garden management database in the tower. After dropping the worm into the nearest compost pile, the drone delays its return to the storage chamber, settling down flat in the dirt to watch the body decompose.


	3. Corpus Vitreum

“Kill the lights.” The skiff pins to the desired latitude and Reaper’s claws drag off the nav console. Sombra meets his summons at the bow. She snaps her fingers and his mask pulls down at her. She shows him her glowing left hand streaked in wires and eyelet mesh. Then she raises her right hand, which is still naked, with a ripped cuff at her elbow. He exhales in a low, foggy drone as he takes her wrist, turning her arm to examine the seam. His mask swings down at his own body, tipping side to side. Fingers ticking under his cloak, he fishes up a sheath of recovered nanofiber. “Forgot,” he grunts as he returns it.

Sombra laughs at him while she tugs the long wrist into place, nanites orienting to their lost comrades and sewing back together.

Whole again, she gets to work.

As the Masî glides under the Oasis tower its control console surges purple. The sunlight sails crinkle away, the traffic alarms click out along the sides, and the waxy embers of the bench lights extinguish. She checks on Reaper to see what other safety features he would enjoy removing. He stares across the water at the desert, red light echoing from the holes of his eyes.

She salutes a couple fingers off her temple at him.

“You sure you’re up for this life of piracy, skip?”

“This is a car in a different body.” He stretches a shadowy talon at the white-hot _AUTO _label on the upper left of the console. “It’s not like the real thing. Any idiot could handle the driving.”

Sombra shrugs, allowing that. Masî is also a leisure brand, so the tower spills across their entire horizon and lingers forever. They both gawk all the way at the unfinished peak. Reaper studies other boats glittering past, fanciful auras that never touch the skeleton on purple jets. Sombra clucks her elbows down on the railing and examines her own reflection in the water. One of the pupal lifeguards breaches through her like a pale pink dolphin.

Starry spikes jut onto the lake from the tower’s foundation. Natal gardens recess between points, never to be touched by human hands. Sombra’s nose stings with cultivated verdancy. She rests her hand on her stomach as she tries to spot the Ministry of Genetics rising from the peninsula arms. Her abdomen grinds on the skiff wall.

With a sharp blink she recognizes her discomfort. She sidles back over to the console and deactivates the autopilot.

“Prepare to be tested,” she announces to Reaper. “I need you to land, uh, there!” She jabs her arm at a bushy autumn maze thick with fallen leaves. Reaper cocks his head at her. Sombra smiles toothily. “I gotta pee.”

His hands thrust a fruitless outrage at the sky. He seizes the controls and directs the skiff to the widget of vegetation at the tower base. Victorian lamps above orange leaf piles switch off as Sombra lifts a gradient leg over the Masî’s side and stamps her toes to the forbidden shore.

“If this is some scheme of yours…” Reaper mutters while she daintily circles the shoreline and squats behind a bushel of dahlias.

“I don’t think you understand how long I’ve been holding it,” Sombra snickers as she peeps over the hedge line at him. He stands in formless black-on-black against the lake. She guesses his back is to her by the lack of a twinkling bone skull. “So sorry to burden you with all these human inconveniences. I thought you’d be excited! I’m finally visiting the high value target!” She pets the sloped wall of the tower, smiling.

It’s a smile that dwindles as she considers the spade leaves around her and wearily snaps off a branch.

“I thought ‘milk carton’ was when you kidnap someone,” Reaper grouses, almost too low to hear.

“Ay, you’re still thinking about that?” she sighs. “You know they stopped printing those cartons way before you were born, right? And after La Medianoche? You’d never find all those kids no matter how many pictures people blast the Net with.”

“Some of them probably don’t want to be found.”

Sombra studies a pond on her left, its surface obscured by constellations of rotting leaves. The time-stopped autumn canopies coil around her, beaming with the red of so many fires. She ducks lower in the bush, squinting at Reaper through the net of leaves. She should be worried when he says things like that. “You don’t like shopping?” his voice makes a dying thunder back across the water, cutting through the tension in her neck.

“Not browsing,” she considers, standing out of the bush. “I always know what I want.” She flexes the nanites on her gloves as she strolls back to the boat. “Besides, if I can’t be seen I can’t really model anything, can I?” Reaper agrees in a sour _mmh. _Sombra hops on the raised wall of the garden and swings her legs back into the skiff. Reaper extends a tiny bottle of pink hand sanitizer trapped between two of his claws.

“It was under the bench,” he excuses.

“Why did you think I wanted clothes?” she wonders as she accepts the gift. She checks under the bench herself as he withdraws to the console and gets the skiff back on track. A velvet pillow presents itself to her seeking hand, and the cover is a luxurious purple. She plots herself on the bench: stretching out with the pillow cushioning her skull implants, an arm unwinding past her gravity-deflated hair, sanitizer clutched tight in her glove.

“You have a good sense of how to express yourself,” Reaper admits after toying with the console a while. Sombra closes her eyes, grinning.

“Aw, you’re so sweet.” When they open again her eyes travel the bony antennae of the empty sail frame. The skiff moves just fine without its dreamcatchers. Reaper is right. It isn’t real. “We killing this guy?”

“Yeah.”

The sky swims starless lime above her. She reopens the S.E.P. map. Spinning her hand, she webs the data backwards, though decades, all the way to the split-second appearance of _Soldier 1._

“Thought you might want him alive. Like Moira asked.” She tips her head backwards.

A red eye answers her from the console:

“That can’t happen.”

“Okay, okay,” Sombra hums. “But she said it would help. I’m sure she’d take an ear or a tongue or something--”

“Nothing for Moira.” Reaper jerks his head back towards the desert. “You wouldn’t understand.” Sombra’s mouth pulls at one corner.

“Some kind of loyalty?”

“Like I said.”

She pans through the Program’s geotimeline. _Soldier 2 _appears and vanishes with the same star-crossed velocity as his predecessor. Subsequent results prove more variable: _3 _stays, _4 _and _5 _go, holes form in the chain. All of them first manifest on the eastern U.S. coast, the Pentagon. Makes sense, she supposes, though it means when Reaper starts he will already be far from home. It isn’t like the U.S. government doesn’t have ample black sites in California-- in all their states, in other countries even. Pentagon involvement suggests a political bent to the initiative, keeping subjects accessible to other parties in Washington.

The wine aurora of Oasis slobbers after the skiff hunting the desert shore. The bench stings where it meets the curve of her shoulderblades.

Soldiers arrive in batches, separating by introspective pauses as her finger scrolls right. _1, _beat, _2_, beat, _3 _to _7_, beat, _8 _to _11_, beat, _12 _to _20\. _The Pentagon is a printer dragging in more material between jobs.

_24 _opens his star and the others in his cohort surround him like the points of a crown. Only _27 _puffs out immediately. Three months later the Soldiers roll down to Louisiana where, under the heavy heads of cypress and Spanish moss, the Omnic Crisis is beginning. _Just in time._

Sombra keys a couple earbuds off the back of her phone and snugs one in. She waggles the other at Reaper until he looks at her. He shakes his head and resumes his tombstone beside the console. Sombra flaps her shoulders and queues on an adolescent guitar player’s very first mariachi covers.

Memphis. Big Sky. Los Angeles herself. The Soldiers play at the border in Nogales, but Sombra doesn’t hold her breath. Heroes take longer to arrive in some places than others. Sometimes they never show up at all. _3 _goes down in Radium Springs, winking off the map, and the satellites don't tell her if it was faulty genetics or just bad luck. The others move on, chasing something up the state all the way to Santa Fe.

The dot of light named _3 _switches back on in Radium Springs.

Her lip draws in. She pans around the time marker: _3_’s signature is missing from the data for the better part of a week. Sombra lets the map play forward. _3 _reappears and hovers at the same coordinates for five days. Then, like her constricting pupils are willing him, his light finally jiggles a bit.

That’s all he does. Sombra watches through three weeks. His brothers aren’t even in the state anymore. _3 _just shakes in place. She blows up New Mexico to occupy the whole map, and the quivers elucidate into erratic orbits that don’t take him any further than a few kilometers from the spit of desert where he fell. When his gravitic well finally decays enough that he trails off south, a month has passed. Just before he blunders across the border, his star flashes cross-country-- somebody finally picks him up.

They don’t return him to the company of his fellow Soldiers, or to the Pentagon. He transfers to an unmapped location in the middle of the Pacific. The shaking stops. He shines in place, alone in the ocean.

A black curtain billows across the alien sky behind the map. Sombra investigates the world past the edge of the reassuring purple hologram and sees her electronics reflecting on slimy plexiglass walls. She sits up, pulling one of her earbuds out. Water brooks away from the skiff jets and rolls up the borders of a tunnel. Hot wind breathes over her face. Reaper remains beside the console, fixed on the abyss beyond the bow. The ship guides that should be leading holiday makers safely beneath the belly of a red dune are all dark.

Sombra curls back against her pillow, reserving one ear free of music for whenever Reaper needs her. The light of the map swells in the black passage. She skips ahead, immersing herself in the diagrams of brilliant interlocked lives.

_Soldiers 24 _and _76_, for example: they are together for a long time. They dance circles around each other in Switzerland. There is a moment twenty-six years ago where their lights stand united in Dorado, not as Soldiers but as founding members of the nascent Overwatch.

But she never needed the map to know about that.

A few months before the end, _24 _prowls out of Geneva and returns to the country of his birth. She matches the coordinates to be sure, but he’s returning to the bayou in Louisiana where his Soldiering started. When she cross-references the dates with some other media on the Net, she discovers it is the site of a civilian-omnic upset. Nothing special. The trouble comes when _Soldier 12_, who has been etching a writhing path around the East Coast for years, seemingly uncatchable, collides with _24 _in the swamps.

All the satellite shows is that in the end _24 _returns to Switzerland-- with _12 _mirroring his coordinates. They live beside _76 _until the explosion, at which point _24 _and his attaché disappear from the map. Holding her breath, Sombra advances the timeline at a custom speed, one second for one day. She still almost misses him, because he doesn’t come back in the same place his light switched out.

He reappears here, in Oasis.

Another few months later other Soldiers start swirling in around _24 _like the eye of a storm, a handful each year. _76 _never vanishes. After the explosion he just ships off to Mexico. _Thanks a lot, Gabe. _She wrinkles her nose.

“Sombra.”

The boat jars as it hits the tense meniscus of the water and the long shadow of the helmsman pillars over her hologram. She wipes the map, cactus prickles training off her implants as she severs herself from the Net. Pomegranate red light from the end of the tunnel etches one side of Reaper’s outline. That same seedy artery dyes Sombra's hair as she rises to his invitation.

Her bones realize there were no cushions on the bench aside from her pillow, and she knocks the back of her hand against her spine. “Fall asleep in that cozy government infrastructure?” Reaper snarls. Sombra frowns at his harsh synth, long-suffering priests drowsing across her mind. Reaper proceeds, “I need your opinion on something,” and crosses the skiff to thread an arm off the railing.

Guitar doodles tingle in her ear until she pulls out the second bud and returns it to her phone. Her eyes adjust.

Thirteen meters off the Masî’s prow the tunnel terminates in a symmetric circle cove. Orangey fake rock dresses up the far wall and the canyon to the land access route, but the barriers keeping the dunes out of the water are all composite glass. A ring in the cavern center admits the torch of the metropolis. Her impression is of a brain, swelling until it splits its skull.

Off the far shore lances a dock of petrified wood, rail posts painted ornate, an arcade of blue coolant barrels glowing on the tip. Holographic arrows indicate the skiff hitches. The security outpost is a cube lodged in the orange terraform behind the dock, red LEDs sheering off the midline of each of three floors. A broad window crosses the complex with a navel stripe and she sees lights bobbing inside, but they’re hazy, like she’s looking at them through wax paper.

She thrones herself sidesaddle on the railing and follows Reaper’s guide to the tumors ballooning the water around their deactivated skiff. One hand goes out to him and he suspends her by her wrist while she fishes down, calling forth the luminescence in her nanotextiles.

Punched glass eyes radiate across the surface of the water. Plastic wings jut at angles from semi-submerged cocoons. Knots of metal itch around the Masî’s sides, puddling oil stains against the white hull. One of the crumpled drones twitches as her light passes over it. Sombra drags her nails through the wound in its circulatory pump: no sign of a bullet, but lots of melted steel. “Has Oasis detected these are down?” Reaper interrogates her. “Are they sending security?”

“The city network believes these are still operational.” She looks at the cove again, and this time she can see the lumps of other machines sparkling in the cavern haze. “There’s an internal loop in the registry for all security units assigned to this outpost. It spoofs their status and prevents the network from receiving their communications. Someone worked hard to make sure everything looks normal here.” She shuts off the drone below her with a tap to its exploded carapace. The glow in its lens trickles away.

“Keep it that way.” Reaper hauls her up from her exploration. “We don’t need uninvited guests.”

“Got it.” She takes out her phone and slots the earbud back into place. It transforms, black with a red signal light. She tunes to Reaper’s favorite frequency as the nanites latch to her skin. “Checking comms,” she says, depressing a finger to the piece.

“Got it,” he echoes balefully at her. “And make sure I can see you this time.” Sombra laughs. “Keep your voice down,” he corrects immediately.

She studies the garbage littered across the cove.

“So, we swimming? The water is going to mess with my stealth.”

Reaper is already swinging a boot over the railing, dropping cinderblock into the darkness. Despite the size of him the splash is quiet, lifeless.

“Wait here,” he gurgles from the water. “I’ll clear the front, then you’ll come in.” Sombra settles on the prow, crossing her legs.

“Can do.”

“You didn’t realize you were blind here?” His skull pans crocodile through the debris. Jackets and napkins and Kọfị Aromo cups float between fallen drones. Sombra notes the bow of a larger Cyrus model vessel poking out from the center of the cove, a single red umbrella spinning upside-down beside it.

“The Ministers didn’t strike me as people who wanted to disable their own organization’s security,” she admits.

“Teachable moment,” he grates dryly. “People are more like you than you think.” He drifts up to the mouth of the tunnel, mask bobbing in and out of its own reflection. “I thought you liked swimming.”

“With my gear, in a nice clean ocean, Gabe.”

“The oceans aren’t clean.” His head lifts a bit from the ripples. “He’s not on the roof. Keep this channel active and let me know if you see any movement there or in the land access.” Sombra makes a stony face at the canyon drilling from the back of the outpost. Like in their water access route, all the guide lights have been disabled.

“Can’t see much of anything,” she mutters on the open mic as Reaper’s mask collapses through the surface of the water. He expands underneath in a many-armed apparition before contracting to an oily flow towards the outpost. Sombra dispenses the remaining microlight from her uniform, the disco bones of her arms and legs parting to the shadows. A real milk carton lady.

“You’re right. This would have been much easier if you still had eyes,” Reaper hisses, a dingy tadpole protruding from the wreckage. _“Eurgh!”_ he gasps moments later. Sombra taps her ear.

“What have you got?” She scans the canyon crevice, and the transmission devices glinting a playground across the outpost roof.

“Tree.”

“What are you talking about?” She reviews the shoreline: not a tree in sight.

“Nevermind. Do you have anything?”

“Nothing yet.” Sombra clamps on her frustration to keep it from turning electric and reaching him across their shared frequency. He told her once that hope was downtime activity. She should abandon the idea that the target might be indoors, maybe on that second floor where the gauzy lights spin in place like ghosts in a ballroom.

The night is unyielding, hot as noon. She circles an inactive spotlight dome on the right corner of the roof; it’s asymmetric, without a partner on the left. Nothing human moves around it. Her focus dips to the outpost's opaque front doors. As Reaper crawls onto the dock, her brain chatters about long-legged Jesus bugs perching on the films between states of matter.

Red light softens his solidifying muscle, drags on the tattered tail of his cloak. The sweetbread jumble beneath the fabric sets and spurts of water fall from his chest and neck, pattering the dock. She inhales with him as his hand spreads over the nearest barrel, lifting it to check for explosive rigging. A scrape of plastic rings through the mic as he lets it back down.

He should go underwater and wind around to the flank. Instead he cramps against the side of the barrel. The tall glimmering lines of the dual Hellfires lift from his coat. He doesn’t call target-- why? A spotlight tacks over the dock from the canyon access. The edges of Reaper’s silhouette fizzle in the beam. He looks so small in the distance, a drowned man bracing to heavy plastic.

Jet engine war cries rocket out of the canyon, announcing a red bannering beam that unravels straight to Reaper’s waterlogged cells. The moment the light touches him the eggshell of his mask knocks open and the silhouette of his hood explodes backwards, steaming chunks kaleidoscoping away into the water. The beam meanders around the dock. Sheers off the barrel tops. Slurs behind Reaper’s boots and tears the dock in half. The vacuum of light tugs Reaper after it, his spine the string that feeds it. It straightens his knees and just starts to lift him off his feet when the beam cuts. He and his shotguns drop backwards into the dock ruins. His mic plays constant static.

Out goes the stolen spotlight. A shadow, nothing more than the glimmers of buckles and casings, drops ten meters from a staging ledge in the canyon and walks like a man along the shoreline.

“Reaper,” Sombra whispers through the chaos in her earpiece. “Target is on your position in fifteen seconds, approaching from three o’clock.”

_“Said that boat was comin’ for me…”_ a fletched, stringy voice hums back to her, breaking apart between the toothy knocks of footsteps. _“Didn’t say you’d send a trick-or-treater with it.”_ The tuneful scratch fades. The static goes out with a bubbly _plip_.

“Get up!” Sombra snarls at her dead mic, nails digging her cheek beneath the scarlet pinhead of her earpiece.

_Soldier 60 _stops on the ramp between the dock and the outpost double-doors. Exposed blue coolant from the barrels steams on the lacquered wood and his outline stretches tall and skinny in the haze. His head dwells under a baggy hood, but there’s something--

something on his face, or--

swollen--

pale as snow--

staring back at her.

He swings a man-sized carton of iron onto his paper shoulder-- he’s so _thin _\--and the mouth of it opens to Sombra, lighting up red in the goat’s eye across the center.

Sombra feels her way up the Masî’s bow in the dark and plunges hand-first over the side. The splash her cloak makes is enormous. Inactive drone shells flay her palms. Nanofiber restructures off her wrists to cover her damaged gloves as she ducks under the skiff’s submerged belly. She can’t find the bottom of the still black water with her toes.

The chorus of red flies to her like a new sun through church glass, like a soldier’s flashlight under the map of ivy vines in the cloister. The drones around her shriek together as the foul color crosses their dead eyes. Sail frames blow off the back of the Masî, impact raising jello waves through the oily water. Briefly the skiff draws toward the beam and flies again.

Superheated carbon and glass dump through the surface as the devil’s backbone peters out. Sombra swims lower to keep the landing body of the skiff from knocking her brain open, and she waits for the bubbling to stop before she rises.

At the surface she takes small breaths despite how her body begs otherwise, despite how much of what she inhales is ash. Her implants tingle beneath the soaked flop of her hair. She wraps herself in pixels and butterflies to the tunnel delta. Her stealth camo breaks and a many-eyed doppelganger follows her on all sides. She has to believe that she is too insubstantial and imperfect a ghost for _60_ to track.

He hefts the smoldering cannon off his shoulder and it cracks the concrete beneath him with a mournful gong, thermal gel spreading out from the back end like a head wound. He withdraws from the festering electricity, climbing the fire escape on the far right of the outpost, long jacket swaying. At the roof he switches on the second of the lonely spotlights. The clammy moon sprints up the water to the Masî, and all Sombra can do is float as the circle dances across her head.

The spotlight peels up the empty sail poles, scours the belly, pauses on the purple velvet pillow she left on the bench. She rotates just enough to piggyback the illumination, studying the Masî. The side smokes and two of three feather-bones are missing, but it’s still floating. Much of what the Soldier hit was the tunnel roof, slicing out blankets of falling sand.

He steers the light back to the dock. He hunkers on the roof corner and a new spout of metal pokes from his shadow. DMR, she guesses, or some other semi-auto. Disparate wires in her brain race to tell her that if she gets close enough, she’ll probably identify it as property of scout fireteams from Oasis security outposts. _60 _fixes the gun at the dock.

Sombra prods her hand from the water and runs it down the side of her face. Her nails drain cool off her skin.

Deep breaths, and when she opens her eyes again, she pushes herself into the cove.

As she swims under the skylight in the cavern roof, algal green from the city drips across her back. Flags of sand pour from the skylight edges, where the glass panels have been burnt and peeled in random collateral slices. She keeps her eyes on _60_, ignoring the long slope of the Cyrus bow pointing out of the water at her.

Needles pierce her leg. Hundreds of them fly through the thin fabric up her shin. Exhaling in trained, even pushes of her chest, she twists apart from her spindly attacker, a pennant of blood trailing after her kicking foot. She probes for the target and finds an angel, replete with furled wings. It pokes plastic white from the water in front of her. She analyzes the base of the ornament and outlines, eventually, an entire Christmas tree sinking in the dark. She flaps her arms backwards, clearing the area, and orients herself once more on the dock and the gunman perched above it.

Sombra stops outside the halo of his spotlight. The dock smells: bloodstains and freed bile. But the water here is as flat and nondescript as any other ring of the artificial cove. Metallic blue droplets slither down from the halved coolant barrels.

A thick discharge of sand from the broken ceiling mutes the spotlight, and she hears a curse on the other side. The light swings off. Sombra holds her breath.

The roof hatch creaks up…and back down.

She forward crawls to the ruby sheen staining the dock poles and ducks into the shadows. Her leg burns.

“Gabe!” she urges at the water.

But it’s the other Soldier who answers her again: the roof hatch squeals. Adrenaline chills her cerebrospinal fluid as stony taps approach across the roof. Something is gnawing her leg. Combat boots stomp another effortless landing on the concrete. The spotlight returns, pocket-sized, streaking through the splits in the dock stump, fragmenting imperfectly across her cloak. It pans through the cloudy red and black water around her.

When the gun goes off it isn’t a single revelatory shot-- it’s a spurting mass, a chain of trigger pulls. She clamps on her ears as the water puckers to her right, mariachi in the swirls of blood. Bullets streak glitter trails around her suspended legs. Her stomach rebels, pushing up her throat, and she sacrifices a hand to quiet her mouth until _60 _runs out his magazine.

He rattles onto the dock. She grabs the nearest pole and looks up through the gaps. His flashlight is a steady dot, but she also sees two moons poking white-green under the hooded furl of his head. She swears she sees the glowing white of his teeth too, unfurling wide up his jaw. There are trickles of leather and the coin drop of the mag as he reloads. His flashlight hangs steady at the water.

A full-bellied _thump _shakes the dock and a gush of neon blue coolant waterfalls off the wood. It’s got the galaxy color of a skiff’s jets and sinks heavily, separating into individual blobs, squid that metamorphose into spreads of phosphorescent ink.

Sombra’s lip shakes as she evaluates the helpful spread of the underwater light source.

She dives. She dives and she opens her eyes.

A flat-shelled turtle with a long neck bloats in front of her nose. Pebbly scales detach from its skin as she thrashes it out of the way. Snails hang in the coolant, shells filling with holes, the slugs inside shriveling and floating out like leaves. More of them greedily crawl Reaper’s headless body on the bottom, sliding in smoking bullet holes to find their way to the edible parts. His claws clench spasmodically in the mud. Wherever the blue liquid touches his open wounds, snails and Reaper alike erupt upward in a frenzy of dissolving black ooze.

Sombra squints against the bloom of the encroaching chemical: Reaper’s neck is a solid black stump, melted shut with nothing pushing from it. Not what she needs. She squirms in place, looking past her own feet. Down where her legs itch, where mosquitoes bite through the film of liquid.

She pirouettes in the hanging water, following the lace of her own blood. Deeper under the dock, Reaper’s mask stares through the crimson threads of her with one intact socket. Sombra flips upside-down and spreads her arms out to collect him.

Clumps trail in the water behind the mask, hot in her hand. She folds Reaper to her stomach and cakes her exterior nanomachines across him. As she pivots to the surface, her leg stops burning, but the pain transfers to the side of her face as drops of coolant drift close. She squeezes her eyes closed as the sting seeps in the corners, and detaches the translocator from her belt. Blind but for the map in her mind, she thrusts the device up and throws as soon as her hand breaches air.

She doesn’t hear it land. She bends herself around the mask, close as she can. Pulsars flower through her closed eyelids as _60 _tosses a nitro stick into the coolant. Sombra translocates.

Still in the water somewhere. Still floating on her side, knees at her chest, pea pod. No immediate gunfire on her position, but she can’t hear anything besides the water spewing and choking against itself. In reflex she collects the skeleton of the translocator and hitches it back on her belt. She opens her eyes, one above the surface and one below. She pushes her face into the warm water to wash away the sting.

The world blurs. Burnt eggs, alchemy, exhaustion. She IDs the pale shimmer under her chest as the lip of Reaper’s mask. Clots bubble from the glob behind it when she applies any pressure at all.

Her head rises to put a name to lights spiking out of the water nearby: reflections of a white-and-blue fire that consumes the dock. She checks the front of the outpost, the sandy shore, and the rooftop, but she doesn’t see _60 _anywhere. The slow meteor burns out on the cove glass. Firelight reflects off the bars of the escape ladder. Her fried ear picks up a groan of hinges at the rear of the building.

Spitting out a mouthful of dock water, she swims to shore and reassembles her cloak. The nanites don’t stop the drips of sludge off her heels as she climbs the ladder, or the lingering sour in her throat. The mask drags on her elbow, growing heavy.

Invisible, Sombra peeps over the roof. Nothing moves on the cluttered stage. She hauls over the edge and dumps the mask on the cement flat beside the access hatch. Clunking down between the generators and antennae on the opposite side, she stretches out her speckled red legs and summons the nanoframe of her SMG from the otherwise innocuous fibers of her coat. Integrity checks as the weapon appears across her hand in a purple ripple, then she sets the nose at the hatch.

An emaciated, tarry intestine lumps over the side of the building and circles a black mirror under the broken mask. Next comes precious metal, dragged all the way up the ladder, jerking in bony curves to the gathering place.

Breathing rocks up from the cement on the other side of the hatch. Clean at first, as venous blue lungs inflate on the roof. Then laboring, troubled, as the cells in the neck regenerate only as moon-gray scars. Reaper sits up coughing.

“Need to withdraw…further away…” he gargles from behind the mask. He swivels around, no more than an outline, see-through. “If he’s below, he’ll hear.”

“Yeah,” she smiles at him, her stealth framework defining her expression in glowing violet comic book lines. “You make good bait. When he comes out, I’ll shoot him.”

“At that angle you’ll hit _me_.”

Sombra’s smile thickens, her eyebrows rising.

“Seems to be the odds we take,” she says. His mask stutters back at her, scanning her legs up to her face. A curl of her teeth shows. “What are you looking at?” she challenges him in a raspy voice, squeezing at her hair, dark water cascading down her side.

“Are you still operational?” he asks as he gets his legs under him. When he tries to stand, he goes down on one knee with a growl, fanning claws at his back. The little clips that hold his grenadier belts and the major vertebral units that fan up his shoulders all glint solid, but the subdermal implant threading mechanical through the back of his neck cuts off in a foaming stump.

“Hm, am I the problem?” Glancing at the hatch, Sombra rotates behind it and makes her way to a crouch next to him. Her stealth dissipates. He draws a single misty shotgun to support her sentry on the hatch. The outstretched weapons hover steady beside each other.

Sombra tips her hand into the clouded shadow of his neck, right under the brain stem, and she donates a few million nanomachines to the cause. A violet needle extends off her nail as she reprograms his prosthesis network to play nicely with hers. The ghost of a throat swallows around her intrusion. As the handful of artificial bones come together, leather spills from the mask edges, tucking over his cracked ears and binding down his silver peach fuzz in a wave of black. Red splotches blink visible in the mask socket and wrap to the corner, looking at her. _So much effort for your style._

“I was on the dock?” he asks. Sombra nods. “I was on the dock,” he repeats, tapping a dull new talon at his forehead. “Need to make sure I get it right, up here.”

“I know, boss.” She stands, and he follows, a muddy pink strand of dawn flushing down the silver on their backs. She can see to the other side of the roof through him. His whole torso acts out rapid breaths followed by inactive pauses of several seconds. “I’m gonna call Widowmaker. She’ll drop in and get him through that window on the second floor, easy.” She runs her finger over the coil of her earpiece and it’s still attached. The red light still shines. She opens the network.

“It has to be me,” he says.

Sombra’s eyes move across his mask like there’s an impulse to be read in the bones. Her hand lowers from her ear…and scrapes across the drying blood on her legs. A few pine needles fall out from under her fingers.

“What did he do to you?” She tips her palm at his current faded outlook. “Before today. When did this one betray you?” Reaper’s head cranes around the rooftop as the growing light eats at him. He stares at the fire escape behind her for a few seconds before he looks directly at her, the willowy wreath of his hood drooping around his mask.

“Nothing. Never,” he answers in that gravestone rumble. “He was loyal to the end.” Sombra’s face drops.

“Okay, so, you don’t just want to recruit him?” she beckons with twirls of her free hand. “Bring him back into the fold? Pal around…” She jots down some spice to see if his brain is as thinned out as the rest of him. “…talk about how dumb Morrison is?”

“No.” He doesn’t even stop to consider it. His voice doesn’t arch with any predictable flavor of venom. Sombra insets her tongue to the corner of her lip.

“This doesn’t really sound like an organizational priority. You’re gonna owe me a favor.”

“Fine.” Like he’s reading his monotones off a card. Sombra frowns. The last time she squeezed a boon out of him it took careful scheduling, working him into a situation where he had no other choice. Stars and planets came into alignment. And now here she is, victorious twice in less than twenty-four hours.

“Anything I want,” she warns.

“You got it.” A final cough ejects from his neck before his breathing sets in that familiar silky rattle. He steps past her, his shell of a Hellfire trained at the hatch. He dips down on bent knees, listening to the other side for a moment. “He didn’t see you?”

“I’m not sure. He has some enhancement on his eyes, but he’s…kind of a bad shot, actually. Know anything about it?”

Reaper’s mask tilts up.

“Cataracts.”

“Cataracts don’t glow.”

“He reconstituted incorrectly." That word again. “It's common. We’ll head to comms and get camera control. I’ll go first--”

“Yeah, okay, fine.” Sombra raps her knuckles on her hip. “He was real scary, so it makes sense to keep tossing you at him as a distraction.” She puffs her chest.

“He’ll have nanos you can exploit,” he resumes in a drone the second Sombra makes eye contact again. “Old gen. So you’ll wait until I have a clean engage, then disable him. You don’t exist until then.” Sombra bobs her chin up-down along with the instructions.

“I’m a lot better at waiting for you to be productive than you realize."

“If he touches you, you’ll die.” Reaper’s voice cuts like static between her ears. She doesn’t know why she starts smiling.

“That’s what guns are for.” She airs hers breezily around the hatchframe. “So we don’t have to touch.”

“Even if he doesn’t have Moira yet, he’ll be stronger than he looks.” Reaper lays the Hellfire on the ground and seizes the turn-wheel on the hatch top. Despite the ghostly fiber of his arms, the locked metal buckles in his grip, popping out wine cork style. The groan of the dismembering hinges vibrates from the roof to the foundations of the outpost, blaring down empty walkways and the massive, motionless lobby atrium. “Don’t get confused by your tenure at Talon. You aren’t like me. We gamble this way because in the end I just need to get close enough. But you only get one shot at this, and I still need you.” He retrieves the shotgun from the cement and glowers up at her. “So put that fire out and get ready.”

“What an invitation.” Sombra watches him bend forward and smoke down the hole. He leaves a lot less of a trail than before. Not as much Reaper to go around. She waits, flicking melted eye shadow from her sockets as she takes her last look at the cavern’s hint of a rising sun. Her chrono app distantly reminds her of the date.

Talons reach up to her, offering a hand to the quiet darkness below. Sombra sits herself on the broken hatch rim and dips her toes in-- they disappear centimeters past the opening. Scooching forward so that her coat doesn’t catch on the shattered metal, she drops inside.


	4. Entry

Reaper catches Sombra around her waist and she kicks her feet, the only movement in the stale air. Her cloth toes stretch onto an oily bronze floor. Emergency lights stripe Reaper with thin red autopsy guides as his translucent hands release her. He collapses to a foul whisper and swims sluggishly down the tunnel.

His mask curdles solid over a hatch beside a huge stationary ventilation fan, and turns to her.

She sways around, drifting on her toes like she’s still suspended, and heads east to the mirror point-of-entry beside another unmoving fan. Piles of ant traps mass against the walls. Moisture speckles around her purple foot on the hatch. Sombra pushes the back of her wrist across her forehead, clearing the sweat. There’s a narrow boot print made of mud and woodchips shadowing her own glowing step. She watches Reaper for the signal.

With practiced unison they kick down and land in the electrical reactor, her SMG and his sole fading Hellfire crosshatching the known blueprint of the room. A solar processor plays brass piano in the reactor core, castle spire pipes flagging out its top and melting into the ceiling. On the far side a door access indicator strobes blue. They line their backs to the motherboard walls and make slow, simultaneous half-moons around the obstacle. Snips of charge steal through the metal all around Sombra, entering her cybernetics, begging for her touch.

A stubby access hallway makes a steel garden arch over the only door. One of the outpost’s internal security bots hovers in the corner, robed jukebox back to them. Sombra retreats from the edge of the reactor wall, lowering her SMG. She bolsters her shoulder to the firm metal corner and the core wall blurs out around her like a stain. Her eyes trace up the seamless holographics: it’s a portrait of the outpost maintenance chief, an old man in a green uniform. He smiles uncertainly in the camera flash.

Reaper hangs static on the wall across from her, his head low, listening. After one-eighty seconds _60 _hasn’t come running to check the noise of the breach, and the security bot hasn’t moved from its odd station in the access cubby. The gurgling swallow of Sombra’s parched throat mushes around between her ears. Reaper's mask tilts at her, and he beckons her forward with a sickle shimmer of his curling fingers.

She leads around the corner with her SMG, her feet patting the grate floor with a line of chickadee heartbeats.

The security robot vanishes and keens back to detail in photographic claps of the blue light above the door. In one pulse she reads the stencil on its armored shoulder: _OPSECWINT13_, the corresponding ID on the Oasis network another null spoof reporting nothing but lies to the city. In a second pulse she reads a quiver in the laser miniguns hanging from its cinnabar sleeves, tight circles drawn at the hallway corner right of the door. She crouches to read beneath the aquamarine cone of its flight unit, and makes out a crumpled hand in a green sleeve on the floor in front of it.

The door panel slicks open on her cold turkey without so much as a warning toll from Reaper. He swoops in front of her, snagging an elbow under the security bot’s head and hefting its egg body in front of his chest. His Hellfire checks up beneath one of the bot’s shaking arms and greets the empty doorframe.

A frisbee-sized cleaning drone putters around the corner, humming to itself. Sombra recognizes the vocal notes of _Let It Snow! _splattered together rhymelessly with the trumpet sections. The drone’s fan-shaped scanner light creases across Reaper’s boots, but it rotates away to the body on the right. It stops only upon reaching the bloodstain ringing the outstretched hand. Using a beam from its belly, it shears the red off the floor, setting a barbecue stink through the hallway when it accidentally grazes the fingertips.

The drone swivels on its treads, singing nonsense as its scanner evaluates the rest of the body. A couple palm-sized litter scoops deploy from its sides and it shovels them under the frozen hand to try lifting it.

The security bot in Reaper’s custody raises a shivering prong arm and fires a single laser bolt. The cleaning drone flies up against the wall in halves, scanner light fizzing out. As the last echoes of the discharge dim across the reactor, the security bot sags back to trembling inactivity in Reaper’s arms, and the door panel puffs closed once more.

Reaper drops his Hellfire and rips off both the bot’s guns, then makes a fist around the glow of its flight unit and yanks its abdomen in half. The bot clunks to the grate on its back, the blanched white lens on its hammer head throbbing at the ceiling.

“All yours.” Reaper steps over the bot and draws a new shotgun from his coat, waiting beside the closed door. The door access light blinks through the brain of his cowl, but he ignores the resource piled green at his boots.

Sombra shies back into the hallway and spreads her hands around the flower of Oasis gleaming on the security bot’s chassis. Her eyes lock on the corpse sharing the room, trying to determine what about it does not meet Reaper’s standards. Male, seventies, mouth jarred open like an invitation. Skin marbled with purple splotches. It’s the eyeglasses half-melted off his head that help her piece together the man from the portrait around the corner. Bolt wounds bubble through his face and neck, dimensions identical to the hole that pastes the cleaning drone to the wall. She locates a set of overrides within the security bot that date seventeen hours old.

“Okay, so the outpost registers a security breach in that canyon and immediately everything on the local network disconnects and operates via preprogrammed commands. Exterior drones de-cloak and stand down. These internal automatons have a brief period where they run attack protocols on…everything squishy… Their subroutines wipe after that.” She fingers the cold scorch mark halving the wireless adapter on the side of the bot’s head. “They never got a command for apoptosis though-- that means destroying each other--”

“I know what it means.”

“Well what I’m saying,” she exhales through her nose. “Is this bot didn’t get a command which defines _that_ behavior.” She twiddles a couple fingers at the cleaning drone wreckage. “In the activity log the system isn’t even labeling the interaction as a logic error. Can’t figure out why it did that.”

“It wasn’t obvious?”

Sombra’s mouth carves a circle at Reaper. He’s still glaring at the door. “They’re freed from the network, so you can’t reprogram the rest of the intact units from that one?” he guesses without looking at her.

“Their connections to each other are in pieces.” Sombra grins bitterly to the pale lens dilating at her from the floor. “It’s probably the first time they have been all alone.” She knocks her nail on the transparent plasmetal sheltering the bot’s light. “Omnics don’t really function without a network.” Her teeth bare as a fresh drop of sweat falls from her brow to the bot’s face.

“Don’t play with your food. Let’s go.”

Sombra closes her hand. The security bot’s light clicks off.

The cleaning units are verifiably still on-task, she supposes. Their programmer in Oasis merely disabled their reporting functions, perhaps estimating that the outpost would have quite the mess to sanitize.

Reaper’s breath flutters as she joins him at the door. Peppery red smoke drools from the muzzle of the shotgun hanging at his side. She accesses the door lock and the panel shutters away, admitting them to the iron rectangle ring of the third floor.

Doors wait on both sides of the hallway, exteriors for utilities and interiors for offices. They sweep around each one as Sombra gains control of the locking systems. A few blank-eyed security bots drift in the corridors, lasers unresponsive even as their optics constrict at the intruders. Reaper liberates the head off each one, buttery red wire membranes streaking apart.

There’s a reassuring rhythm to the jack-in-the-box pop of each dark doorway and the weave of their gun barrels around the abandoned desks and empty chairs. Patience sews her and Reaper together, lays a cool cloth on her head as they pace through the cramped heat. She pats his leathery shoulder and he advances into a doorframe funnel. She follows, taking the opposite corner, and the world slots together around her in a briefly clairvoyant jigsaw.

Behind one door a water cooler appears, but no cups. Reaper finds her a coffee mug on one of the desks, but when Sombra pulls it close she discovers somebody else’s lipstick tattooing the rim. She leaves it dry on top of the iridescent plastic barrel.

Each kissing corner of the hallways features a wide staircase dropping to the second floor. The two of them aren’t enough bodies to maintain clearance on every side of the outpost cube. After they finish three sides, Reaper assigns her to the staircase east of the solar reactor and clears the last corridor on his own.

Sombra wraps her hand around the stairwell railing-- letting go when she notices other fingerprints in the dust swirling down the wood. She descends a couple steps and leans over the railing without touching. The atrium should be at the bottom, and the outpost’s big bay window, but the staircase is a dark portal that the neon fuzz of her arm barely penetrates.

She heads back up and checks the mouth of the stair behind Reaper as he ducks into another office, then the far stair she can make out on the other side of the reactor. There is one stair neither of them can track from their positions. The pleasant ooze in her veins dries and her tongue chafes inside her mouth. Her chic LED-studded Sentinel feels like a toy in her hand. Thick maintenance pipes swim over her head in a rigid ouroboros.

Reaper returns, lining a talon to the front of his mask as he reaches her, and she wants nothing more but to tell him that he looks ridiculous. They proceed on the stairs to the landing, slow, guns out. From their perch on the calligraphy quilt at the halfway point, Sombra discerns lighter-than-black glimmers across the walkway below. According to the blueprint the second floor is a glassy rim around the top of the lobby atrium. There aren’t any walls to imprison the sunrise.

But there are patches of tarp flapping on their right peripheral, a makeshift curtain nailed across the window.

Another security bot sits atop its blue nightlight at the bottom of the staircase, its back to them just like the first. She could program it to lie down before shutting off, eliminating the possibility of a noise. Pinning a toe down the first of the lower steps, she makes a cat claw to offer the idea to Reaper.

His mask shifts a negative. She retreats, crossing an arm around her stomach as he descends in her place. Not far, just a step, enough to wall her off. Like she can’t see straight through him. His breath sucks in through the gaps in the mask. His hollow chest lifts in a meditative breath. She wonders if it’s the bot causing him discomfort, or the ubiquitous pressure to stay quiet even as he relives the same moment over and over again.

He raises his sobbing shotgun and props the tip on the railing. _Knock-knock. _

The security bot wobbles a slow, stupid circle to face them. A taped clump of nitro sticks and clay obscures the rainbow of Oasis on its torso. Reaper’s arms smoke upwards, wings that fog the landing with thin, crumbling feathers. Sombra scrambles at the third floor.

Fiery whispers rend through the stairwell concrete, peaking in a tea kettle crack that lifts her off her feet. A magma drill bit catches between her shoulderblades and bangs her face-first into the sloping ceiling.

The incredible pressure quits and dumps her back onto the steps. Wind erupts out of her lungs before she can cry. Burning dust replaces it.

Someone else is screaming in her place. A low voice strangling on its own pain, clawing at the underside of the stairs. She lies on the steps in a froggy spread, coughing out white clouds in the faded red light, and her hand drags towards the cone of blood around the communications tag in her ear.

“You okay?” Reaper’s voice cuts in clear across the line before she can pull it out. Sombra’s hand splays lifelessly against her earlobe. The stairs lurch under her, tables of cement detaching and clocking into the atrium below. The screaming metamorphoses into a blinding ring tone that crawls down between her ears.

“Operational,” she jokes, not sure if she made up Reaper’s prompt in the first place. She makes that promise, but she can’t get up. All her body does is cough. Twigs of blood split her forehead, trenching down the insides of her eye sockets and blurring into the chemical fire of the mascara on her cheeks. Her unequipped ear is deaf to anything but shrieking bells, which she figures out when she tries snapping her fingers next to it. Familiar rifle pocks snap across Reaper’s mic. “Are _you _okay?”

The Reaper is laughing.

Sombra discovers she can stand.

“I got him,” Reaper cackles. “He couldn’t tell me apart from the explosion.” More gunfire. She recalls the leaden movement of his vapor in the reactor duct.

“Don’t push it.” Holding her warm glove to her bleeding ear, SMG bobbing in her other hand, Sombra limps into the dusty third floor hallway. There’s a pause on his end like he’s evaluating that piece of wisdom. Chops of glass shatter around him.

“I’m cut off. Doors are locked, the stair routes are all rigged.”

“I’ll get you out. I’m heading to the northwest stairwell.”

“He’ll be in front of you, southwest stair. I’ll keep him distracted. If he sees you, you’ll--”

“Sees me, hears me, touches me, texts me…smells me?” she proposes in a slur across her mic. “Any of those, and I die? But enough about men! He’s destroying me without even knowing I’m here.” It’s hard to believe how much energy her body can sap from a simple exchange of words. Her legs work out that they’re not going to fall apart any time soon and she jogs under a line of spiderwebs newly built in the defunct ceiling fixtures. “I don’t exist,” she assures Reaper as she swallows her stomach and descends the northwest staircase.

Another vacant robot waits at the bottom. Just behind it a maintenance panel sits under the purple umbrellas of a heliotrope in a planter vase. Sombra edges down the steps sideways, butt to the railing. “I’m in position,” she whispers, casting an eye through the flower stems at the atrium.

_60 _crouches in the southwest stair as promised, white eyes straining from their sockets and filling the aviator panels of Oasis-branded maintenance goggles. A thick scarf buries his mouth and nose. It’s just the eyes to suggest he has a face at all, and they are fixed-- along with his rifle --on the Reaper.

Reaper spikes up the curtained window in a dragon dance of jagged black branches, the tree from Moira’s tube if it could electroswing in the light of the Caduceus. At Sombra’s words he veers three-dimensional over the rubble pile at the southeast stair and dives the target. _60_’s bullets shred pieces of smoke from the oncoming knot of angry veins and travel on to break coins of sunlight from the window.

The maintenance panel is a flat hexagon of titanium, impervious to physical attempts at breaking in. Patterns of purple electricity from Sombra’s fingertips sweep through the conductor and confirm her access to the switchboard on the other side. The panel snicks apart with a confirming ring tone-- a scalding knife through the pillows wrapping her skull.

_60_’s head snaps towards her position. Reaper looms solid in the other direction; can’t even get one shotgun out. His boots are oddly silent. Rifle shots punch through his chest and dust launches out of his back. _60 _grinds Reaper to smoke before his claws reach.

He exchanges the rifle for a service pistol strapped on his thigh. As he stands up over the slowing vapor Sombra spots a layer of pink twisting off his ribcage, blackening, nothing hitting the floor but ashes.

She keys on her stealth as all the doors around the walkway-- save the heavy gate into comms on her left --loosen open, access lights rolling violet.

“Take that first maintenance closet in front of you,” she hisses as Reaper’s smoke lurches away from the other Soldier. He wisps around the doorframe and _60 _chases. “There’s a vent in the back. You might have to move some boxes. Kick out the particulate screen.” _60 _levels the pistol at the darkness in the closet and starts firing. Sombra calmly repeats her instructions.

“Got it,” a staticky groan echoes back at her, reverberating inside a pipe.

“Keep making right turns and you’ll reach comms. Once I get in I’ll unlock the other particulate screen--” The pistol fire stops. _60_’s hooded head swivels her way.

Seeing nothing, he turns back to the closet and steps inside. Emerges moments later with shreds of cardboard and ashes following him. He trudges back to his rifle, rests a numbered detonator on the lowest step beside him, and reloads the pistol with ammunition from his cargo pocket. He has trouble with it. His fingers are slippery with blood. As he’s moving on to the DMR he collapses backward on the stair, impact shaking a black clot off his side.

Sombra unfolds from her crouch behind the planter. Her ears burn, her skin a clammy sheet taped down under plastic, but in her muscles, in her deep places she feels powerful. The Soldier just lays there wheezing under his dirty scarf, and the shine of his eyes disappears under his goggles.

She glances at the door to comms a handful of steps away, but her gun is already slotting into her hand. An electrochemical phoenix wriggles up her spine, and her feet glide towards the incapacitated target.

Her Sentinel isn’t quite a Gabriel Reyes special, but if she’s close enough-- if it’s his head, even her bullets must work. If Reaper gets mad, she can say he basically did all the work. She is looking at a dead man. There isn’t any skin left where Reaper struck him, just dissolving links of muscle fiber and the platinum reflections of ribs. His internals might not be showing yet, but his DNA expression can’t keep up. The soft hatch of pink and black doesn’t look much like a shotgun punch. It’s more like a wild dog stole up to him in the night and scooped out a chunk with its long mouth.

She checks over the glass banister as she trots to the target, absorbing a flash of the outpost’s ground floor: unlit multicultural holiday tokens draw a spectrum around the lobby. Battery-powered anachronistic snow flake and seed pod holograms open and bid welcome to Oasis, the city of science. Guards in gray suits lie under the festive confetti, variously dispatched by laser burns and bullets. Another booby-trapped security bot hovers at the main gate.

A civilian omnic model reclines near the gate to the armory, limbs rent from sockets and cracked to pieces.

Sombra passes the closet Reaper escaped into. No sign of him, but the mops lining the back wall and the sleeping cleaner drones in their cubby are all stenciled full of pistol rounds.

_It has to be me._

She could sweep through the Soldier’s nanotech, leave him unable to heft his weapons, maybe unable to stand. Reaper couldn’t complain. The target would technically still be alive. Everyone would be happy. She leans over him, nails reaching for that scarf around his face, assessing if he’s upgraded anything since the days when he warred with evil robots instead of other human beings.

A drop of blood slides off her ringing ear and hits the Kevlar half-torn from his ribs. The ruby trail sifts around the pebbles of the armor and tracks into the open wound.

_60_'s chest lifts, a pulse of potter’s earth, snuffling under the blankets of cloth. The bleeding on his side shrinks to a few scattered trails. A wet spot forms on the front of the scarf.

Sombra clutches her ear, backing away. A bullet sunk in the floor chips her heel. The cellophane around her head is starting to air out. Red dots smear the plush carpet between her retreating feet and the revived corpse.

“Which one are you?” The Soldier’s pistol gets up faster than the rest of him, dripping at the end of his arm as he bolsters an elbow on the stairs. For the first time Sombra notices a crescent of blue almond grenades dipping out of the wraith bandages around his right side. His pistol muzzle sweeps across her head but stays quiet. “I’ve buried the rest.”

_60 _raises off the stairs, baggy red glove tucking to his ribs. His whole body wrinkles with another boar-like whuffle. His face tips towards the floor and the red trickles celebrating all over it. Sombra pivots and runs to the staircase. “You I’ve beheaded, I’ve burned. I think I shot out your heart just now, but you’re still here,” he calls as he limps up the carpet behind her. “Will nothing make you sleep, you poor lost soul?” He stops and gazes into the mealy remains of the closet. Sombra changes position again, ducking out from under the heliotropes and entering the access hall to the comms gate. She needs him to turn his back, or withdraw to his rifle at the stairs.

He pulls back from the closet without stepping inside. She flinches each time he kicks in the other unlocked doors along the walkway, checking inside with his pistol before continuing forward. He closes on the northwest stairs and passes out of sight. She hears him knock on the security bot’s lens. The bot’s synthesizer wretches out a crooked whistle. “Why don’t you smell the same as before?” _60 _mutters.

Sombra doesn’t hear him after that. Not toying with the bot, not turning back to his rifle. Nothing at all. She peeks around the corner.

The Soldier is so low to the ground she would miss him were he not right in front of her. Knees bent out like grasshopper foils, mantis arms gnarling over the floor, his fingers spread around a dried red flake balancing on a carpet wire. As his head draws down to sniff at the guidepost, his scarf drips loose from his face.

At first she dreams it’s a mask, like Reaper’s. The skull under the hood. But there’s a waxy husk of skin strapping to the points of the bones. Veins suture blue through the temples, subdermal ticks of blood chug through the cheek hollows. Chalky films web across the rearmost molars, but most of his teeth hang in full display, red-stained rows parting from each other with a robotic lever of his jaw. As the chafed puffs of flesh lining the nasal tears flex, cords in his neck churn like a line of guitar strings.

Rents in his coat demonstrate that his wound isn’t so pink because Reaper ripped all the skin off-- it’s because the skin is a translucent cellular sac, prone to crinkling full of vitreous rifts. It’s repairing him even now, new flesh greasing his chest, flapping off his side in sags of excess regenerative power. But Reaper is there too, rooted in him, a dark crevasse growing spider legs between his ribs.

Strings of long black hair drip out from the edges of his hood as he bends forward. A bruised purple stocking drops between his teeth and hits the dehydrated blood on the floor. He stands off the ground immediately, pulling his glove at his gaping mouth. His entire neck convulses in a swallow and his cataracts widen. Hot sunlight from the broken window spots his poorly disguised rail of bones on the walkway. He tucks his tongue back through his jaw and it slithers inside, words pouring from his eternal black grin, “Is that what I was missing?” Ancient strips of eyelid wrinkle closed around the glow of him. “Protect me, Catrina.”

Sombra decloaks. A security bot lies in the shade of a decorative fern on the other side of the hall, gushing coolant from the roots of missing arms. Its lens quirks up and down her appearing ghost as she flattens her palm to the door scanner.

Heat pours in the listing lobby gates, summoning the souls of the guards scattered on the ground floor. They are alive again, dancing in the vacuum breeze, rising with the fire of the desert. They sing in her red ears.

Rewriting the comms access code is a silent process, but the gate itself unlocks with a titanic metal click. Sets her smallest muscles twitching. Gets those skeleton boots charging on her location. She shoulders in the leaden gate panel as a grenade tapdances onto the linoleum at her back.

Lock the door. Activate the shield matrix via the interior control box. Lemon air freshener streaks up her nose. The grenade goes off in a strangled, child-like _pock_. Pistol rounds drum on the kinetic barrier. Sombra leans her bloody ear on the door as the gunfire stops. _60 _approaches surrounded by the jangling, clicking music of his reload.

Turquoise caresses her cheek. Purple priority communications streak through the implants set between the wedge-shaped bruises and burnt cloth on her back. The shield system talks to the security console, auto-activating a view of the exterior camera feed on the big monitor across from her. Sombra’s eyes skip over everything else in the room and fix on that wireless glow.

The pixel Soldier takes a card from his pocket and slides it into the access scanner. He tries multiple times. The gate holds steady, her new locks disagreeing with his old keys. He stalks out of view. The camera hangs on the tinker block parts of the burst security bot and the smoking fern fronds painted across the carpet. Old laser holes warp the monitor.

Sombra’s fingers slide off the control box. The monitor remains a motionless photograph as she lifts herself from the gate and steps into the communications room.


	5. The Boss Goes Dancing

A woman breathes in the magician’s light of the command console, poinsettia exit wound shivering between her breasts. _MALALLAH _is the name she’s given by the label on her tiger gray security uniform. Jacket fabric and grilled skin mulch together in the laser char on her chest. The second bolt hole traveling through her forehead doesn’t show blood, just a melted pouch above her eyebrow and the odor of a pot roast as Sombra squats on the floor next to her.

“You don’t run from los muertos…” Sombra trails her fingers through the short brown hair around the woman’s face. “…linda,” she smiles.

All the other guards in the communications room mash together against the east wall. Broken necks, gelatin spines after hitting the plaster. Lasers filed through their skulls after the fact. Eyes like iced-over ponds or moon-colored cataracts. Holsters emptied of pistols. The stained, stolen miniguns from the bot outside lean empty on the wall beside the pile.

_60 _must not be used to the ammo type. Oasis weaponry could be eclectic in its pursuit of beauty. Sombra notches her SMG to Malallah’s temple. “See you later.”

Her bloodshot eyes flick at the ventilation grate on the west wall. It stands at toddler height instead of worshiping the floor, a blueprint error. Keen portraits of outpost captains scowl at either side, and a long postage stamp of the Oasis tower fountains above. Someone has tied a lemon slice-shaped air freshener to the tower base, but there’s no wind coming through the vent slats. Sombra’s eyes keep rising until she is gawking at a fan unmoving on the ceiling over her head.

Guitar strings pluck out of a stream radio on the command console.

Many-legged scrapes jingle in the vent grate.

Her finger slides back off the trigger.

She checks Malallah’s thigh holster, but her pistol is missing too. She leaves her, heart beating, shins screaming as she winces to her feet and approaches the command console. The screensaver of an Oasis flower morphing into different ministry sigils pops away as she lines her hands above the metal keys. She avoids the lush technician’s chair and the promise of a leather balm to her spine, a relief to her tangled legs. Her own reflection, all murk around the eyes and cheeks, stares back at her from the waiting monitor. Sombra transfers in a single line of code, skipping the system UI, and the light over the vent grate flashes green.

She walks to the vent holding her aching left ear. The guitar from the radio nibbles up the canals of her head. She wraps her bloodstained gloves around the particulate screen and the lasers darken as she pulls it out of the way.

Reaper isn’t there. An upside-down cockroach leans on the vent mouth, wings partially flushed from its brown case. Sombra hunches onto her knees and puts her eye to the hole. Nothing moves in the darkness. Her breath tugs off her lips and travels inward, down the pipe. The vent is just big enough for her hand.

She sits back, sniffling, wiping her red wrist against her nose. She grabs the lemon air freshener off the tower portrait and throws it to the corner of the room. Shimmying her belly flat to the plaster, she reaches into the vent.

Metal panels wobble and bang around her knuckles. Her nails strike a bend in the pipe. She pats around, looking for the corner, and ends up folding carefully at her elbow to send her hand down. Her shoulder disappears into the vent mouth. At the lowest place she can reach, her glove soaks through with liquid.

Another hand wraps around hers.

She heaves up the pipe, the mass tangled in her fingers breaking apart as she pulls on it. Christmas bells follow her extricating arm, and as she rocks back from the wall flattened pistol casings chunk out of her hand and fall to the floor. She turns her palm up.

Cockroach legs motor as the insect’s ghost sinks into a quivering black lump on her hand. After the last flicking wing absorbs through the surface, the lump goes still. It has a trailing back end like a little teardrop. “Kind of looks like he got you too. Again.” Sombra curls her thumb in to nudge the lump. It falls on its side at her pressure, revealing a few unevenly sized caterpillar nubs along the bottom. All the bloodstains on her glove are gone. “If you don’t get up I’m going to tell everyone how cute you are, Gabrielito. Just think, no one in the world would be afraid to die anymore. They’d all be laughing with me.”

She coils her nails in and kneads the lump with them. It is completely pliant under her fingers. She can’t even find the skeleton of the cockroach anymore. Aside from a few pushes of its pudgy footless legs against her intruding digits, the lump doesn’t move.

Sombra ignites to her feet on the warmth of a sigh. “So far the best part of your plan has been bringing me along,” she informs the lump as she strolls across the room.

Her glowing feet hesitate beside the woman gasping on the floor.

She keeps moving. Crouches down to the wheel of crunched bones at the east wall. Dragging in an arm from each man, she crosses their rigor mortis fingers to make a small plinth. “But I guess you know that,” she hums to Reaper as she dumps him on the array of fingernails.

Sombra flexes her fists over her head. She’s wearing a big grin as she turns around and kicks to the console, her arms relaxing in a cross against her grimy hair. “Finally I can see what’s new!” she exclaims to the machine-- to Reaper, to Malallah on the floor. Her nanotextiles slough a layer of dust from her coat before she plops into the technician’s chair and crosses her legs up on the cushy seat. She accesses the local systems with a perfunctory flap of her hand.

She lets the radio play. She doesn’t know the words, but it sounds like someone talking back to her. Steady, lyrical, loving. Guitar strums vibrate through her left ear. The Net embraces her with the cool, scentless wings of a planet. Camera feeds parade onto the monitor. There’s movement in the lobby. Sombra expands the image with a doodle of her finger, depressing her head into the chair rest.

_60 _roves through holiday decorations and corpses to reach the armory gate, DMR strap wound around his brittle bleeding chest, pistol in his hand. Eyes half-lidded, she lets him unlock the armory with his card, then tweaks the emergency protocols active. The door panel slams in his face. She smirks, the expression glued to her long past the pleasure. He slams his fist into the gate, but saves his grenades this time. He sags back from the bloody imprint on the steel and lifts his pistol, checking the ammo counter. His face hangs low into his scarf. He cradles his rifle, pressing it to his pixelated ribs as his coughs wrack through the audio line.

Sombra disables his card and resets the outpost doors. Her digital hand can’t stop him from breaking the glass on the first or second floor and fleeing the area. But as the symphony of closing doors builds all around him, he merely lists to the center of the lobby and buckles, coughing, over the mosaic of fallen guards.

She keys in a closer view. He lifts the captured gray hand of a guard in front of his bandaged mouth. Sombra’s eyelids lift so she can take in all the details.

_60 _sobs and holds the cold fingers against his forehead. She blinks, and blinks again as his desperate groan pierces through the camera mic. He drops the stolen hand and chooses to shiver and cough.

Sombra blows air between her grit teeth. She files the Soldier away and returns to the armory exterior camera.

The wrecked civ omnic lounges in the corner of the frame, arms and legs cut out around it like panes of glass. Humanoid models are rare in Oasis. In fact when the thought brushes her mind, the network happily streams her an exact count: 92 within city boundaries. Insignificant compared to the thousands of drones and automatons, and millions of exalted human beings.

Drumming on the console, she edits the omnic’s silhouette together from the still frame and scans the Net for its model number. Personal butler, though from her own experience it’s pretty small. No size of butler has any business preventing a lost Soldier from accessing the armory. Whatever fresa serves as its ward wouldn’t be hanging out in there.

She double-checks her assumption against the armory interior camera. No bodies.

But there is another door in the back with scorch marks on its armor. She interweaves the city network’s outpost blueprint with the local system map. The extra door (_SPECIAL TRANSPORTS_) only appears locally, requiring the outpost captain’s ID to access-- that, or some knowledge of how to crack a fifteen-ring seed lock. As she spreads through the code branches, an additional camera feed hops online: _SPECIAL TRANSPORTS INTERIOR. _Wiggling in her seat, Sombra clicks it open.

The secret room is full of scientists, identifiable by their blue galaxy robes. They lay on the benches and floor in the back, sleeves ragged, knees bloody. Green suit technicians tile protective hedges between them and the door. A couple gray security guards were probably once keeping watch at the very front, but they have since collapsed atop requisition boxes and lengths of tarp. She doesn’t see burns or bullet holes in any of them, though the scientists’ robes bell flowery around their soft skins, hiding their vitals.

Movement bristles out of the shadows in the back. A single blue robe wades out to the guards, his round bearded face and fierce muttonchops crystalline in the heat. He sits on a box beside one of the other men and checks his pulse, then helps him sit up so he can sip from a water ration in a plastic bottle. Sombra takes a snapshot of the scientist and queries the Net for a name to go with the face.

Her gut has its own suggestion. The purple data lanes take a microsecond longer to corroborate: Al-Zahabi. Understudy to the Minister of Biology, and now, lunchbox stuffing. Sombra smiles as he attends the other guard despite a beleaguered, arm-flapping protest from one of his colleagues. None of them are trying to use their phones, and she can’t locate Al-Zahabi’s on the Net-- per the outpost manual, heavy shields block signals from that particular vault. The camera gets through by hard wire. _SPECIAL TRANSPORTS _indeed.

A watered guard zombies onto his feet, startling Al-Zahabi, who raises an arm to steady him. The guard hovers his hand at the door controls and Al-Zahabi along with the other still seated guard shake their heads. Al-Zahabi tightens his hand on the other man’s sleeve.

The guard thrashes Al-Zahabi off and yells out in Arabic. Al-Zahabi tilts his chubby face to the vents on the ceiling.

Sombra tunes thoughtful _pop_s from her lips. She never noticed any damage to the solar reactor. The local system claims all maintenance structures are intact despite the current use of emergency power. She scrolls down the activity log and locates a ten-hour-old manual switchover verified by the credentials card of the dead man on the third floor.

_60_’s hands have been on this keyboard, attempting to suffocate loose ends out of hiding.

Her gloves retreat from the ashy metal caps. She extracts the entire local system from its physical shell and loads it across her own processor suite, the monitor going dark as her purple holographic interface replaces it. She takes the _SPECIAL TRANSPORTS INTERIOR _camera between two fingers and pulls it closer to her eyes as she switches the ventilation on.

The tiny people under her thumb squirm alive like a dish of cells. The would-be doorman of the apocalypse retreats from the controls, Al-Zahabi patting his shoulder. A guitar in the radio hums a new beginning. On the lobby feed _60 _buries his face to a guard’s stomach. Sombra sweeps into the other maintenance systems, unfurling through the outpost, smiling as the big white lamps ping on over her head and the rotary begins to spin.

Reaper ruptures his blanket of corpses and bursts across the floor long and featureless.

A partially eviscerated mummy drops out of his cloak. The rest of the guards are untouched. Black resin casings and spirals of wet membranous underwing hatch from his back. Beneath his smoking skin an egg pushes and turns, splattering out as an incomplete pewter duplicate of his mask. Sombra wonders if the lights are bothering him. The circle sockets of the mask overflow with incoherent red smears. He isn’t looking at the lights.

The diaphanous curtain of Reaper claws across the tile. His mask pushes forward too fast for the neck supporting it. The silver knots of his implants undulate down a watery back of indeterminate length. With chatters like breaking branches, his wings slough away as he moves. Cloudy droplets vine out from the bottom of the mask as he reaches the woman breathing shallowly by the door.

Sombra unfolds a toe to the floor and swivels her chair. The purple gleams of her holograms wrap her in an unaccountable silhouette.

Reaper goes silent as his hands latch at Malallah’s hip and shoulderbone, dragging her under the ratty drape of him. His face submerges in the brown tails of her hair down her neck. Sombra wonders if it wouldn’t be easier for him to kiss her, to exploit the hole that is already there. The mask drops away.

Malallah’s lips part a little wider on her last breath.

The body parches inward. Fingers stiffen black and translucent. Skin dries to a catsuit across bone. Reaper rocks against the corpse, muscle swelling to fill the cavernous welts where his prosthetic staples into his back. A shotgun bubbles straight out of his forearm, spiking clear as a tower covered in veins and falling to the floor. The pulsing barrel crackles to dust as Reaper rises onto his thick calves, the corpse’s wrist hanging from his opaque black fingers. Malallah’s bones dwindle and shatter in his grasp, making her hop and twist beside his steel-coated leg until all that remains is an empty purse of cloth and suede.

Reaper’s coat edge sways clean and intact just above his heels as he rotates his shoulders, his back to Sombra. He gets the major details like that right away, but gauntlets are still boring in down his arms, crimson munitions belts are still sharpening the grip of the coat. He exhales and smoke flowers around his jaw, soaking through his overgrown hair and drawing it out in an ebony torch. His right hand stretches open and his mask drifts off the floor, rising on a swirl of ink to his fingers. He fits it on and the excess hair clips down to a silvering military fade as the leather sews up around his skull.

He carries the human-shaped velvet to the wall in one fist, dropping it beside the other bodies. He crouches and fishes through, dragging a fresh one out by the ankle. His talons pin the cloth of the guard’s sock away and he holds the flesh by his mask. The third victim evaporates, so fragile that when he drops it seconds later, white pieces flake off.

Sombra wishes there had been such an efficient scavenger at the church when she was young. The pond would not have stunk so badly.

She closes the extra camera feed in her lap and deletes the secret vault from her updated blueprint. As she turns back to her other illusions, Reaper thumps past her chair to the vent in the west wall. There’s no way his hand fits, but she hears him scraping at the mouth.

Sloshes of metal squeal up the pipe while Sombra gawks dutifully at rows of camera feeds.

“See anywhere he might nest up?” Reaper inquires from vent-side.

“He’s not going to sleep if you’re here,” she wonders. Reaper’s shadow creeps over the square shoulder of her chair. The knives of his fingers reach into view and notch to the radio. He turns the music off.

She spins up a couple auxiliary ultrawide holos for him, expanding the menu of camera feeds across the fresh virtual real estate. He selects a view of the commissary.

The skinny chrome tabletop meant for utensil blocks and cutting boards is littered with dozens of half-pillaged jerky bags. Sombra shakes her head, a laugh moving up her throat like a dry heave. “What happened here?”

“He was always hungry, but he didn’t know why.” Reaper drags his hand across the feed, zooming the image. The door to the pantry in the back hangs open and Sombra notices a sleeping bag coiling over a bench inside. She glances at Reaper for elaboration, but he returns the commissary to its slot in the row and expands the current view of _60 _in the lobby.

Together they watch for a while. The sobbing that devolves to nothing but chewing. The bumps of _60_’s sharp shoulders as he reaches and gathers. Reaper’s throat surfaces in a growl, “It won’t work. It won’t save him.” He pulls down the camera for the main gate, the security bot there vacantly observing the proceedings in the lobby. “Best case scenario, we get him outside and drive him back into the desert. Wait a couple weeks.” His mask tips at Sombra. She squints at him. “It’s safer,” he grumbles.

“You won’t make it. Fresh guards rotate in before New Year’s. They’ll track both of you down.”

“Guess you can’t hack nosiness.”

Sombra knuckles the side of her jaw, leaning on the armrest as she drags _60 _back into focus.

“He wouldn’t run anyway.” _60_’s eyes glow into the camera as he props up from the corpse. “He sees the boats coming and reacts by attacking them. If he really wanted help, he could just have accepted the invitation quietly. That’s what you do.” She peeks up the chair back at Reaper. “I don’t get it. He came all this way, then chose to self-destruct?”

“Are you familiar with learned helplessness?” he asks. He’s looking at her, not the man on the camera. Sombra pushes her lower lip out, nibbling at the corner as she pops her eyebrows up. “He probably has some trust issues,” Reaper amends in a grainy rasp. Sombra laughs. “You good?” He snakes a talon at her eyes. “There’s blood all over your face.”

“Oh.” Sombra smears some of the darkness off the corner of her mouth and looks at it on her finger. Her nanofibers clear it after a few seconds. “I think most of this is make-up, actually.”

“Your hearing messed up?”

“It’s not as bad now. Must have some callouses in there given how much time I spend around certain one-man bands,” she crows, loud enough to drown out the molar grinding in the feed audio. Reaper takes down his hood and tucks his hands at the back of his skull.

“Do this.” He plays his fingers down an invisible piano just above his neck.

“Whoa, your zopilote is pretty spot-on. I can see why you use the hood,” Sombra snickers.

“Just do it.”

She wraps her hands under her hair and smacks her fingers against her shave lines.

“Now what?”

“Keep doing it.” Reaper abandons his demonstration and stares at the camera feed. As the unspoken sun ticks higher, holiday jingles pump into the lobby, masking the activities of the man on the screen. _Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! _speakers announce to the empty building in the desert. Sombra moistens her lips and her lipstick tastes like copper.

“Do you know La Catrina, boss?” she asks as her fingers drum the back of her skull. Reaper’s mask lowers from the candle of the hologram.

“Did he say that name?” Sombra nods. “She’s his wife.”

“Yeah.” She coughs when she goes for another laugh, even if the air streams cool and salty from the ceiling now. “I bet she is. Stole her from you, I take it?”

“Why was he talking? Does he know you’re here?”

“Please. I think he might be aware that not everything is what it looks like,” she admits. “But he can’t figure out what’s wrong, why it’s happening.” These are the words of hers that finally make Reaper laugh, a sweet drag from his synth. “So, just a shadow at his back, right?” she smiles. “He sounds like a lonely old man to me.” Reaper waves his hand at her.

“Let go of your head.” Her gloves plummet to lifeless fans in her lap. “Is the ringing better?” She blinks down at her fingers, thinking about it.

“Yeah.”

“It’ll probably come back, so just do it again if you need to until you get medical.” A shotgun forms thick and fiery in each of his hands. The Hellfire designs are old, harkening all the way back to the Omnic Crisis. There’s even wood on the grips. Only the black skins and crimson lights are new. He eyes the tiny Soldier on the camera. “If you insist, we’re ending this right now. Same idea as before. We’re finally together. It’ll work.”

Sombra scripts a luxurious line of her feet onto the tiles beside his wide steel boots. She activates her cloak, her invisible Sentinel configuring together in her hand. Even after she steps away from the console the local system slavers after her purple wireframe.

She and Reaper tread together through the slight outline near the armored gate where the floor is clear of dust.

The gate panel opens as they approach. _It doesn’t show signs of stoppin’,_ the walkway speakers clamor over their heads. _And I’ve brought some corn for poppin’. _There’s smoke in the air, oozing off the burnt walls. Her bloodstains on the carpet and banister across the atrium gap have all vanished.

As Reaper approaches the glass half-wall, a rifle round buzzes by his head and pangs into a ceiling light. Sparks roll down his coat. He lifts the nose of his shotgun and Sombra moves out, crossing to the far walkway.

Marigolds roll loose around her legs as she parallels the suspected firing position. She didn't notice the planter before, bulging from the wall beside the maintenance closet. She leans onto the glass. Her glove moistens. She hikes her palm from the wet spot and a clear, sticky cord of fluid follows her fingers. When she looks closely at it, she finds dots of pink inside.

“Have I always been dead?” _60 _shouts into the atrium. His voice echoes from the high ceiling. Reaper steps into the light across from Sombra. She doesn’t like him standing there with no cover. She leverages her upper body atop the wet banister and hangs an arm limp over _60_’s hooded head. He twists his face over the corner of a metal drinks cabinet, and she can make out the crystal films of his eyes.

He doesn’t use the rifle again, even with the target now easier to see.

“Did you lose your mind?” Reaper’s voice fills the room without an echo, deep and steady. Hologram snow whirls between the two of them, flakes spinning gold as they graze the sunshine from the broken window, darkening again as they reach the lobby, transforming to ash.

“I don’t think so.” Movement under Sombra’s waiting fingers: _60 _loosens his fist off the rifle stock and picks a grenade fruit from his belt. “You do what you have to,” he coughs.

“Then you’ve only been dead since the moment you let me know exactly where you are.”

“I don’t know why I’m asking you. I don’t recognize that ugly voice. But you’re the first one that talks back,” _60 _chuckles. Reaper looks across the gap at Sombra. She cocks her fist and snaps her fingers out from her palm as fast and wide as she can.

“Once they start eating, they lose everything they had left,” Reaper answers _60_. “It’ll happen to you too.”

“And you?” When Reaper doesn’t respond, _60 _clears his throat. “Well if you’ve got something to show me, you’d better get down here.” He hugs the grenade closer to his dripping abdomen. The Oasis flower on the side stains with his blood. Sombra loads the weapon specifications from her umbilical to the local system. “What are you waiting for?” _60 _barks.

Reaper accepts the invitation, vaulting the glass in an arc of smoke, plunging to the lobby in an anvil cloud. Sombra sheds her camouflage as _60 _sits up, his ragged arm fixing back in a baseball pitch. He waits for Reaper to rise from his landing. Reaper stands up among the scattered puzzle pieces of the guards, hood billowing, coat edge rippling around his ankles. He hangs still beneath an ocean neither of them can see, mask panning over the fallen.

_60_ slides down the toggle on the grenade shell and throws. As it separates from his glove, as it rides past his face, he notices purple ropes following along, and his eyes trace up the light to the second floor, where Sombra is smiling at him. Curly marigold petals fall to him from around her silhouette.

“You aren’t one of us,” he grunts.

“Just a friend.” Sombra draws her translocator and tosses it up the walkway. _60_’s eyes chase after it. She shakes her head and points him at Reaper.

Reaper drops a gun to catch the grenade. He sniffs once at the violet pixels swirling around the body of the weapon, and he vaporizes the blood off the side. Then he tosses it back. Sombra releases her control as the grenade twirls up to _60_’s head. His hand sticks out to harness the sun.

The explosion is a blue dandelion surging out of his fingers. The drink cabinet rockets apart into melted quarters. A white eyeball taps Sombra’s cheek as it streaks by. The remainder of _60_’s body vaults startled deer into the mountainous artificial Christmas tree dominating the lobby and dents the metal branches in a shower of blood.

Sombra’s perch affords a window over the dust plume-- she empties her mag where _60_ lands. Sparks brighten the fog as she hits the body armor under his cloth. The glowing membrane of his remaining eye opens up and follows her through the confetti of falling needles. A DMR round clicks past her ear and she translocates.

Reaper fills the gap, Hellfire roaring orange and red. He is just pulling the gun’s partner from his coat when _60 _launches off the skirt of twisted metal and tackles him. One red hand locks around Reaper’s neck, the other arm terminating in a spaghetti stump that bashes at the side of the mask. Boots skid up waves of pixelating snowflakes. Reaper scalds off the side of _60_’s thigh with a shotgun blast, then drops both weapons to address the fist around his throat.

Sombra reloads, taking the translocator back to the first floor. _60_’s eye moons at her over Reaper’s shoulder. He detaches himself, his own chest torn open by claws, Reaper’s neck unmoved by the wrench of his hand. He drops to his knee and gathers one of the Hellfires littered on the floor. His firework wrist and remaining gnarls of his left arm help him lift the barrel at Reaper’s chest. Snow and grafts of skin dance in the white Christmas lights.

_60 _pulls the Hellfire trigger and the trigger bulges out spiny and metallic around his hand, biting off his finger. He didn’t make a peep for his eye, but he screams now as the weapon crumbles out of his arms and smokes back into Reaper’s hand.

The Soldier wrestles out his pistol. Sombra ducks behind a marble model of the Oasis tower, neon snowflakes chilling on its polygonal tiers, guard corpses gray around its foundations. When she peeps around the side, _60_’s eye is on her.

“There must be only one way to hurt you,” he says as he turns back to Reaper, pulling off the torn remains of his DMR strap. As Reaper’s mask follows the clatter of the long gun to the floor, _60 _flips up his pistol. He uses two fingers in place of the stump and fires into the mask.

A hole appears between the bolts, but nothing tears out the back of the hood. _60 _collapses from the force of the pistol shot, body settling against a support pillar for the walkway.

Reaper cracks his head from side to side, then bows the mask instructively at the floor. _60 _follows the guide to the soft, cold bodies piled around the pair of them.

The corpses jitter inwards on a spiral. Hands fly up and gushes of brown smoke flitter out from under fingernails. Dead eyes open and all are red as the sunrise. A blurring mist smeared across the lobby contracts inwards, slipping under Reaper’s hazy boots. Skeletons hill against his legs, lights fading from their sockets. The hole in the mask fills back in with solid bone.

“Shouldn’t have been so eager to shoot up the place,” he sneers. _60 _seizes over double against his own torso and drops his empty pistol. Reaper taps a talon on the side of his shotgun. “But in a way you are lucky. Your sins came back to you before they could fester, or be forgotten.” He lifts the broadside of the Hellfire at Sombra. “The nanos,” he rumbles.

First she sets her translocator back in the marigold field on the second floor. _60_’s head lists back, bracing on the column, staring up the trail of purple arcing over him. He swallows, closing the cataract glow away, which she appreciates. “Now,” Reaper persists, right into her earpiece. Greedy, hungry, echoing in her brain: _now, now, now._

She tip-toes past the black pall lurking at his boots and the gathering of deflowered corpses. As she raises her hand to access _60_’s inner workings, his arm slips around from his stomach and rolls the last of his grenades at her.

“Really?” Her hand flops over on its side. The Soldier’s burning skull turns and looks at her. Frowning, she translocates.

Grimacing as she reappears safe on the second floor, she glances at a marigold squashed under her manifesting foot and activates her mic: “Give me a second--"

The grenade activates downstairs, tossing white pine needles and chunks of calligraphy rug over the banister. Her left ear starts to ring, and just before the church bells drown out everything she reads the thunder of the Hellfires in the air, two shots.

Silently a bloody hand hooks over the glass wall next to her.

Sombra’s eyes draw to the movement, and as _Soldier 60 _pulls himself up the glass fills with spiderwebs. One of his legs ends in threads at the thigh, and he falls on his face in front of her.

His skull lifts out from the rags of his scarf, the left side nothing but bitten black angles. Sombra stumbles as her heel hits the bullet in the carpet again. He juts down his razor shoulder like a skeletal quarterback and latches his hand over the banister, dragging himself forward on his remaining boot. A crater in his torso floods pulp onto the floor.

Her SMG blooms yellow across the carpet fibers, knocking teeth from the opening hinges of his jaws. But there are more molars sprouting out of the bone all the time-- too many, layering on the roof of his mouth, squeezing off the purple lumps of his tongue. Femurs plume off his ruptured thigh and knot to the floor in a helix of cartilage and muscle, propping him upright, turning him faster than her within seconds. He lets go of the banister and draws a combat knife off his belt. The black origami wave of Reaper tides over the banister and lands behind him.

_60 _dives at Sombra with the blade in his partially dismembered hand. Reaper fires from behind, detaching the limb just under the elbow. The shotgun pellets glass her too, slicing into her cheek and shoulder. The blast force crashes _60 _into her. She hits the floor, nuggets of concrete spearing through her hair. Her head bounces on the metal beneath the streak of blue carpet. She hauls her knee up her chest and kicks. Bendy ribs warp backwards into his organs and she knocks him off. She cuts to her feet.

His cornucopia of a leg sweeps under her, hits her ankle, and something important cracks as her body twirls involuntarily. She smashes into the floor elbow-first and raises her SMG. Reaper’s smoke races up the carpet.

_60 _wails as her bullets chew out through his back, a shallow trail through the static in her ears. His tears hit her face. He screams and cries and his shoulder splinters in two above the mulch line of the Hellfire wound. Peach and pink discharge from splitting skin, winging into bones that open and steam and fly down at her neck.

The pieces of his face watering down at her begin to round on the burnt side. An eye budges out from under the translucent bridge of his nose. Iris and pupil are both shades of red. As he blinks at her, the pupil duplicates and tears apart.

Reaper’s talons hit _60_’s spine, cleaving his weight off her. His gummy metacarpals stay clutched to her throat, his arm stretching a proteinaceous rope off his side. Two starving dogs fight at Sombra's feet. The collar of _60_’s grip tugs her toward the fracas. His moist guesses at fingers adjust around the back of her neck.

A _crunch _rakes through her ears and her SMG drops out of her hand.

She flops to the ground as Reaper hauls _60 _away. Her gun arm hangs in an awkward claw beside her head, a few small red dots making outposts on her fingers. Her coat blots the marigolds with its own purple flower. Her lips dry, her mouth stuck open.

When she tries moving her fingers to the place where he touched her, they jerk on flimsy nervous threads, juddering impotently against the floor. Reaper’s Hellfires go off gauzy and distant, even though she can see him just a couple meters away, red light socking holes in the target under his boot. He toes the broken strap of the nitro detonator off _60_’s hip and kicks it down the walkway.

Reaper pants visibly at the end of the performance. He ducks towards the liquefying mass at his feet.

Her vision of him blurs when he stops mid-hunch. The white shape of his mask swivels at her, catches on a sunbeam. It doesn’t look like him to her, it looks like the crawling thing in comms, its eyes shocked wide. Reaper’s hands crack open, dropping the Hellfires as he rises back up, a black hill gawking at her.

His boots come towards her silent, shakes in the carpet. His shadow crouches down beside her and a furl of talons sink into her broken ankle, drawing blood. She tries to scream. Her mouth opens wider and a wet noise slurps inside her unseen neck. Reaper’s mask turns all the way on its side.

His talons crawl up and wrap her cheeks, turning her face upright. Smoky red tracers prickle off the corners of her lips and flow into the nose and eyes of the mask leaning towards her. Her right hand thrashes in place when she tries to slap him.

The mask crooks down. He undoes the clip holding her collar together and unzips it to her clavicle. She closes her eyes briefly as the layers peel from her throat like so many wet leaves. Whatever Reaper finds he stares at, broken from his trance only when her body jerks from hips to shoulders in a flavorless wring of muscles.

One of his claws snugs around the side of her belly, the other wrapping across her shoulder, like they’re dancing. A dance on the floor. Tears bead from the ripped tendrils of her eyelash extenders as she follows the dip of his mask at her neck, so close she can see her own reflection in the bolts across his forehead. Sombra smells the ocean, here of all places. Ancient, primeval saltwater stings her nose. Her purple eye travels all the way to its wet corner, but he’s too low, too deep for her to see what he’s doing.

The nose of the mask makes a syringe tip at the side of her neck, then the mask drops away. She can’t even curse him. Her arms tremble uselessly.

She spits up a noise when something crushes into her throat skin: an ugly, deep, wordless expulsion, growing in volume as she feels pins rearrange inside her neck, needles latching in, shuffling around. Grindstones echo up the tubes below her ears and her jaw stretches without permission, tugged down and side to side from below.

Pain surges fresh, nerves crystallizing through her windpipe, curling out to discover the rest of her throat. Inflaming skin sears a hot red chain all the way around her neck, implant wiring and shards of plastic erupting out the rear. She hacks as air streams back into her lungs. Her ears clear, soulless puffs of the ventilation system and rumples of Reaper’s coat spotting in around her head. The impulses screaming down her arm suddenly bear fruit and her fist swings up to hammer Reaper’s jaw. Her fingers dagger down the side of his hood. The mantle rips in her claws, soft and semi-liquid.

He sits up, dropping her. Her hand slopes to his shoulder, tightening when she sees his face. Black vapor seeps out of her neck, running into the seam around his. She lets go of him and feels her throat, massaging the ridgelines where _60 _grabbed her.

“I didn’t…” Her voice is a ghoulish cackle, every word a grenade in her esophagus. She turns her head to one side, mouthing the sentence, practicing before she puts air back to it: “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“You are still useful to the mission.” Reaper’s lips move, but his voice comes from smoke in the mask lying beside her head. “We haven’t ruined everything yet.” 

“Right, how could I forget…?” She listens to the old lady windmill of her voice. Smiling hurts. “You know, I’m not usually a big fan of being touched.” The glow of Reaper’s eyes flickers over her face.

“I get it,” he says.

“I guess if it’s you, it’s okay though.” Sombra drops her cheek to the carpet. There’s a fleck of color beside her hand tightened up in pain: a cataract white eye, all by itself. She wraps her fingers over it, squeezing as fresh agony twists up her shin. She’s swollen under her sheer leggings, blue knot in a smooth branch.

Reaper responds to the noise of her, putting his mask on and holding a hand over her. She nods and he gathers her off the floor. She must have been mistaken before, that ocean smell-- he’s all sweat and naked adrenaline. It’s familiar…by a few decades. “No seas miedoso.” Sombra wipes her upper lip and prints a blood mustache across the side of her finger. Frowning, she smears it into Reaper’s shoulderpad.

His path to the main stair walks her past _60_, whose individual pieces are fermenting on the carpet. Nothing taken by the black Hellfire grows back. She can’t really tell what she’s looking at. There are curls of fingers and splashes of black body hair from pockets of transparent skin, but of the details she can identify there are too many, and of others no sign.

He heads towards the commissary. The door is right under the body on the second floor. Despite herself, Sombra looks up. A few of _60_’s arms mush against the banister glass. Nothing moves. She tries to open the commissary door without moving from her drape across Reaper’s arms, but her broken network strings rebel with zaps to the back of her brain.

He brings her up to the wall and tears out the panel wiring so she can tie the right colors together, moaning sourly all the while.

Reaper ducks through the frame and a gallery of vending machines glow past on their right. Sombra wrenches her neck checking the contents and her hands claw up around her burning throat. Reaper prowls the silver kitchenette, reflecting at all sides, below and above, distorting across the curve of a sink faucet, glittering on the char-licked face of a stove. He crosses to the pantry in the back and stops in the doorway, his shadow coating everything inside black. His mask turns from side to side. Sombra squirms.

He tugs the old-fashioned chain to the golden ceiling lamp. One massive step forward and he deposits her on the smelly green sleeping bag spread over the bench in the back, which she makes sure to protest with an _“ugh_”. A huge vent mouth occupies every centimeter of ceiling not taken by the lamp fixture, slats flexed open and black, breathing down on her.

Reaper uses a belt lying on the floor to hoist her injured leg into the air, rigging her to one of the vent bars. She lays there like a wrong-direction flamingo, rubbing her neck. There are sticky indents on the side where he leaned down, but no blood on her hand when she pulls it back.

He cuts the sock off her uninjured foot and uses the strip of cloth to secure some instant ice from one of the pantry shelves around her broken ankle, looking at her face as he tightens the knots. She sticks her tongue out at him.

“Wait here,” he orders. Sombra rolls her eyes at the naval rig surrounding her leg, and juts her arms out wide.

“Check the vending. I want Takis and Yakult!” she commands as he stomps back out of the pantry closet.

“You’re disgusting,” Reaper snarls.


	6. Just Visiting

Only a gate of dusty plastic slats keeps the vent mouth from dropping a meter and biting off Sombra’s broken foot. A pot of nausea grows inside her stomach when she tests the angle of her leg against the belt binding her to the ceiling. Earthy rustles, like parting curtains, trickle from the vent and swirl around the rocking pantry lantern.

She fingers the back of her neck and hits a tangle of electronic lace, skin moistening as she tugs another centimeter of insulated wire off her vertebrae. Her hand slides back into view covered in bloody pieces of iridescent stuffing.

Nothing she needs to survive, she thinks as she smears the debris against her lips and down the red-black bruises on her throat. Just like the omnics the tech is modeled on, her prosthesis provides a link between the equipment under her skull and the tactile networking interface grafted down her back. Unlike an omnic, she can live without the Net. For a little while at least. She can hold her breath.

Without the Net, there is nothing to feel but her own body.

Sombra grabs at her shoulder and cheek, where the Hellfire pellets struck her. There’s a rip in her sleeve, a scrape on her cheek, already scabbed over and dry. She tries to sigh and the noise completes as a pitiful cough.

Distant breaks of glass tingle through the sequence of metal doorframes separating the pantry from the lobby. Sombra gazes across the neon-streaked kitchen. Overheads reflect on the jerky wrappers sprinkling the prep table. She pricks the comms bud from her ear-- an orange signal light over the mic tells her the connected frequency is empty, switched off. A flapping shadow pixelates through the snowflake holograms in the lobby.

A deep voice gurgles out of the vent on the ceiling, followed by a wet _snap_.

Sombra props herself up, gawking into the overhead abyss. Mite-sized stings poke through her glove on the sleeping bag pillow. She listens to the vent a while before glancing down at the strange texture.

The pillowcase is covered in short, gristly black hair from somebody else’s head. Sombra’s hands fly at her skull, ripping off the strays stuck to her fade. With a vengeful slap she catapults the pillow out of the mouth of the sleeping bag.

Homemade knots patch the flannel beneath with an off-color square of denim. She touches the anomaly and a tooth bites back at her through the field stitching. Her fingers fly back, briefly.

She lowers her hand and slits a nail through the loose thread.

Hidden within the sleeping bag cotton is a dog tag. Sombra hooks her thumb into the chain and drags it out onto her palm.

_CARMIKE_

_NICHOLAS  
_

_O NEGATIVE_

_09 0000 060_

_FSM_

The corners of her mouth shake up at the last line. She pulls the tag in against her chest, webbing the chain into a bracelet around her wrist. Shredded wires pool over her shoulder as she leans forward, covering herself in her own shadow.

In the vent the growling digestives surge in volume, spotting invisibly on the slats. The pipe swallows over Sombra’s bowed head.

Reaper’s groan arches down the ventilation. Talking to himself-- that’s what she thinks at first. But the muttering changes inflection, shifts in tone. Exchanges back and forth.

The stakes in her windpipe are her allies, dampening the pink sheer in her ankle when she lifts her foot clear of the belt loop. She lowers the strange blueprint of her leg, blood pounding down her thigh and heating up the bony wreath around her ankle. She grinds her teeth and examines the pantry shelves.

Boxes of plastic snack bags, crayon-colored scissors. Effervescent pyramids of instant ice. Straight white cylinder pipes of PVC. She collects a pair of scissors with the tips of her fingers and lays the blades on the back of her neck. She squeezes. Her loose strings fall off, a scrape of skin taken with them to the floor, a narrow jewel of silver exposed under her jacket collar.

Without the tech weighing her down she grasps onto the shelves, using the interlocking wooden slabs to haul herself upright. Balancing her one operational foot on the sleeping bag, Sombra cranes at the shadowy gate in the ceiling.

_“Burn me,”_ the vent says to her.

It isn’t Gabriel, and it isn’t Nicholas either-- at least, not how he sounded in the time she knew him. Not forcing air in a bone flute throat with a snaking tongue. There’s a liquid undercurrent to his words, a mushy noise other than him, veining and spreading down the pipe. Curling against the little hairs in her ear that carry sound. “I don’t want to go with you,” the composite voice begs. “So burn me if I have strayed.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” Reaper answers in a slow, steady frost. “You died a long time ago.”

“That isn’t what you said before,” Nicholas chuckles. The laughter ends in a choking _crunch_.

“I lied.” Reaper’s breath rattles in the metal pipe for a long time. “It isn’t something you did, some mistake you made. It isn’t your fault. It’s programming. This is how it always ends.”

“So…you were just trying to scare me?” Nicholas sounds like he’s trying mirth again, but it comes out as wheezy gasps. “Psychological warfare, boss?” Sombra’s stomach compounds into a boulder in her abdomen. Her sole surviving leg trembles under her weight.

“Rare that you were in that stage for so long without anybody wounding you,” Reaper murmurs.

“My eyes went bad. I was okay before that.” Nicholas’s throat cracks, momentary skeleton. He comes back warm and rich: “I can see you so clearly now though.”

“There must have been some incident earlier. Somewhere _you_ started,” Reaper hisses. “Something you can’t quite remember? Were you on-duty?”

“I was at home with my wife.” Nicholas laughs like a morphine high, puffs of air vacillating out of his lungs. “We were having dinner with Valerio and a bunch of regs. Valerio showed up out of the blue one day, claiming the Feds were chasing him. Said they’d shot him. Showed all the signs, you know?” The giggles fade, but Sombra can hear his smile in the dark. “We got him hooked up with one of the shelters, added him to my support group at the Rotary. He seemed better…but I noticed he was losing weight. Decided to contact the VA hospital on his behalf, and we were gonna tell him at dinner, see if we could convince him to get checked out. Had the other guys from the Rotary over to support him. Shouldn’t have done the dinner. He didn’t even eat anything.”

“He attacked you?”

“Brothers aren’t enemies. Don’t you remember that?” Reaper’s response is a muddy growl. Nicholas clears his throat painfully and continues, “Some guys I didn’t know showed up. Cat thought they were part of the Rotary, so she opened the door. Soon as they saw Valerio they opened fire. You’d never think a whole house full of soldiers could be so helpless.” Nicholas stops, gasping. Sombra shifts one hand to a higher shelf and lifts on her toes. “Was trying to get to Cat, but that’s-- I can’t remember-- never went back there. I don’t know if she’s--”

“I’ll check.”

“You’re not the one I want to find her.”

“You won’t rest unless I do.”

“Did you ever go back for yours, Reyes?” Nicholas waits, catching his breath, but there’s no answer. “Before, was that your kid? Looked younger than I--”

“_That’s not mine. _And she’s older than she acts.”

“Forgot how big your wings are,” Nicholas gurgles. “You’ve always been the king.”

“How many have you taken from me? How many did you fail to bring with you? Where’s Valerio?”

“I was looking for him…” Something thumps to the carpet on the second floor. Nicholas sighs. “That’s right. When I woke up, I started looking…but it was others I found. Tried to help them, but they were only good for burning. Then after a while you were the only one on the news anymore. Saved the best for last, I guess.”

“There’s worse than me,” Reaper spits down the pipe. His rage remains salivary after, scratching and dripping inside the metal. It takes him time to reset. “The Program lied to us.”

“We knew. Knew it would be something. You saw that photo of the second guy. We needed the results.”

“They lied about why the war happened.”

Sombra holds her breath and she doesn’t even feel pain.

“Doesn’t matter,” Nicholas coughs. “We had to survive. The machines wouldn’t stop. If we don’t either, that’s probably just as intended. So burn me down. I’m pretty sure I can still let go, unlike you.”

Sombra’s fingers gnarl into the grain of the shelves. Reaper isn’t answering. She puts her hand up another row, entire body a tight cross in the lamplight.

“It’s too late for that,” Reaper growls finally. “There’s only the mission.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Strange you see me but not yourself.” Another hiss, a leashless outrage. Reaper coils under a shell of cruelty, “How do you think you’ve been speaking?”

“No… Let me go, Reyes!” Nicholas’s voice pitches high and thin and weighted with tears. “Please--” He disappears mid-word.

“Reyes,” Reaper grumbles to himself. “Listen close, _60\. _I’ll tell you what happened to Gabriel Reyes…” Sombra strains her face to the vent.

Shadows behind the vent slats separate into legs and a blue spider disgorges upside-down into the pantry light. It drops at Sombra’s eyes on a moist thread and still she hangs, trying to listen.

Only when the spider’s legs spiral forget-me-not over her eyelashes do her hands leave the shelves to slap around its tiny body. Some of her weight comes down on her other ankle.

The diamond crackle of her bones shoots up her leg. Her swipe at the invertebrate blots off-course. More of her weight teeters onto her busted skeleton.

She tips over backwards, grabbing at the formerly solid pantry shelves. The cheap wood slides out after her weight, falling on top of her as she hits the floor ankle-first. Sombra’s teeth part breathlessly. Her eyes roll up. The pain departs with the rest of her mind.

She reactivates after a moment, or so it seems.

The pantry floor dials into focus. Between her nose and her collapsed hand sits a milk carton with a crushed top. On the front panel a Bedouin rides an electric horse with a dished snout and inkline legs, rope spinning forth to catch a rich brown goat.

Behind the milk carton, a midnight fog swallows the pantry doorway. Raw heat pours off the churning curtain. Rippling gases film across the doorframe.

Sombra locates the nerves in her hand and stretches towards the darkness like it’s a mask she can pull away. She can’t reach. Stiffly cracking to life on the tiles, she checks the other direction past her stained jacket collar. Her ankle has been propped back on the bench, with a fresh pile of ice. The sleeping bag is gone. The cycler in the vent at the top of the pantry clicks on, dumping a few noteless fan currents into the room. She meals her fingers against her palm: Nicholas’s dog tag remains tangled around her hand.

She lines her headache down her arm. Rests her eyes from the glare of the lamp. Shoves her knuckles at the wet corners of her lips. When she peeks at the milk carton again, the kitchen sits in gray portrait behind it. Speckles of sunlight make a dance floor of the blue lobby in the distance. The Bedouin vaquero smiles knowingly at her as her own mouth shudders. Sombra unravels a few fingers to the milk carton and claims its wrinkled body.

The carton is lukewarm.

Her fist tightens around it. Hiking her elbow back, she throws the colorful box out the door.

She pushes the shelves lying on her ribs off and sits up. Other pantry flotsam scatters around her body. She grabs plastic bags and a carton of instant ice, and when she’s done with those she snares a PVC pipe and uses it to push herself onto her one good foot. Her toes print bare and cold on the dirty, bloody floor.

The infamous hacker clunks her weight down on the bench like an old lady and tests her connection with her nanomachines. The Net might be temporarily closed to her, but these purple ticks sit right on her skin, mix with her blood, fill her eyes. If needed she can build a chain of them down her own ear to her brain. But she needs that first inkling of recognition, that splash of conductivity through her cells. Pretend they are nerves she grew herself.

She opens her eyes to the vision of her naked foot, and her jacket layers thin by a few micrometers. New linen matrixes across her toes, locking her away beneath metal that imitates cloth. She wiggles her remaining ankle and stands. Her stealth cloak wires across her face in nonsensical kaleidoscopes, bending outwards to consume her clothes, evaporating her off the floor.

The phantom with the dragging PVC foot limps past the vending machines without a second glance. _Myrrh is mine_, the speakers at the top of the atrium sing. Every last corpse has gone missing from the holographic snowfield in front of the dented Christmas tree. Sombra knocks along between Oasis posters and magenta chaise lounges into the blue shadow of the hologram projector. It spotlights straight through her. She turns a circle in the center of the room, eyes clearing the banister glass to check the second floor walkway.

Nicholas is gone. No sign of his arms, overlong to vestigial, mashed against the glass. Not even a sampler of blood.

Reaper hunches in front of the armory gate to her left. Her foot smears across something soft when she moves towards him.

She finds a pile of deflated gray cloth hiding in the snow around her feet. The knob of her cane lifts the headless collar and finds nothing-- no loops of baby bones, no shriveled skin. The security uniform fabric is dry like it has just been laundered. Swallowing to grease her tongue, she drags herself up to Reaper.

He stands and fragments of the butler omnic’s body throw into relief beneath his shadow. As he twists towards her, pieces of the omnic’s head paneling and a few red wires fall from his relaxing claws. The skull beneath him has been turned on its side and completely emptied through a gap in the back.

Reaper stares at the last spot she bumped her cane to the lobby tiles. Sombra retracts the cloak for him, allowing him to see the wireframe of her ghost.

“Ready to go?” he asks. She glances past his shoulder at the armory. No signs of entry. Keypad is intact rather than hotwired, particulate screen remains in place on the vent at the base of the wall. Reaper follows her line of interest, and when he sniffs it startles her: he sounds like he’s wearing his lungs outside his ribs. The voice that comes out is still his, or his synthesizer translates it that way, “Is there something else?”

“Think I might puke is all.” Her own voice is a surprise too, a small, scratched thing. But it gets his mask back on her.

“Your leg?” Sombra shuffles up to him. “Wait till we get outside,” he grunts as he collects her off the floor. She lets go of her PVC and it clatters away, rolling to a stop against the dismembered leg of the omnic.

Every sway and impact of Reaper’s boots sends gongs of agony up her shin. He cradles her in one arm so he can retrieve the empty guard uniform in the middle of the lobby. She slaps a hand over his shoulder for balance. His mask turns at the glint of Nicholas’s tag dangling off her wrist.

He ferries her towards the main gate where a security bot drapes the ground, head and IED rig both missing. At the last second he makes a turn and they pass down a hallway, Reaper sweeping up additional uniforms he’s left hedged along the walls. They exit through a service door in the back.

Fire blue as a Dorado sky dances in a dumpster beside the outpost. Reaper tosses the uniforms in and an ebony tower burps out, staining the outpost wall. Sand plunges from warps in the cavern barriers, sparkling into glass where it touches the colored flame.

“Local system told me that the cannon he used out here belonged to an anti-aircraft APC for the outpost scouts,” Sombra mumbles, laying into Reaper’s collarbone. She checks the cannon’s former position on the outpost steps, but the only thing there now is a cherry puddle. “Guess you gotta tell Moira your scientific designation is ‘fighter jet’.” Reaper rumbles under her, pursuing the still pink waters that glue the outpost shoreline together. Sombra gives the teeth of the canyon a parting glance. “Do you think we need to clean up the scouts for her too?”

Mayflies float off the shallows and settle across Reaper’s hood as he hesitates by the foot of the burnt dock.

“I’ve done enough. She can figure out the rest.” He looks down at her. “How’s your stomach?” Sombra shakes her head. His head creaks to one side, a degree of owlish irritation that makes her smile. “Do you need to pee?” he demands.

“I can hold it. We’ll be back at base soon enough.” Reaper’s breath whistles under his mask. Sombra searches the white plate, blinking. “You called the ship right? Remember, ‘Sombra needs medical’…?”

Reaper’s head lifts to the green taunt of Oasis beckoning from the plasmetal prow of the Masî in the tunnel. Blue smoke gushes off the sides of the boat and the gleam of the city resembles a star on a far horizon.

“I need to talk to Moira,” he growls, boots cutting into the shallows, mayflies buzzing off his cloak. Sombra clears her throat a couple times trying to get a complaint out. All she’s got is an unholy squawk when the dangling bait of her legs hits the resistance of the water and her foot wrenches in the relentless forward force of his advance. The noise pitches into a squeak as her head submerges just before his.

She wakes up again, and the water is dropping its warm fist off her ankle as Reaper climbs one-armed into the skiff. He deposits her on a pearlescent bench, ignoring the volley of curses. The painted plastic starboard around her smells, engravings charred black. Reaper drifts to the helm and powers up the console.

Of course the baleful ship still flies. Of course its shattered and scorched body does nothing to impair its return to the tower of Oasis.

Sombra plops down flat on the bench when she can’t find her pillow, camouflage slowly crawling back around her soaked jacket. She looks at the dog tag curled around her hand. Drops of crystal roll from the lettering.

She thrusts her arm out straight from the bench, chain uncoiling, tag swinging in the morning breeze. She’s sure Reaper can hear the whispering glimmer of the old name on its silver yoke. She coughs on the Masî’s lingering ash the first time she tries to make words, but they come eventually:

“Feliz Navidad.”

Reaper sets the nav to auto. He stalks up to her. His talons bite through her glove as he frees the tag from her. The object along with its connecting chain dissolve as he imitates a motion like he is storing them under his coat, close to the skin.

Sombra rolls onto her back, empty hand spread across her chest. She smiles as the Masî emerges from the tunnel and the light of the blank sky comes down on her.

Reaper remains by her side.

“I need that map.”

“I’ll email it to you as soon as I fix my tech up,” she sighs. She wonders if there is a way to pretend she lost some of the data connectivity when her personal rig got destroyed. Just a missing dot or two-- probably not. He would ask questions. Her ribs lift under her resting hand in another series of shallow coughs. As she rubs her red-pocked cheek she notices Reaper watching her. She frowns back at him.

“Stay close the next couple days.” He backs off and plants himself on the bench across from her. “If you get a fever or anything like that, tell me right away.”

“Um.” She sticks her elbow into the hard benchtop, hiking herself a little closer to the mountain of his outline. “Why’s that?”

“It would mean I forgot something again.”

“Not sure I like the sound of that.”

“You would like living it even less.” Reaper spreads his boots lazily, like he’s claiming the entire bench for his exclusive use. Sombra rolls her eyes and drops her head on her sooty arm. She fingers her twice-drowned hair.

“Do the problems with the S.E.P. mods carry over to the stuff Talon’s guys get?”

“Who are you worried about?” he hisses. A single lock of Sombra’s hair comes off in her fingers. “No. I told her that if she was going to apply it somewhere else, she had to be sure that wouldn’t happen. That they would die like soldiers should.” Reaper’s voice rocks darker, deepening out, “No one left behind.” Sombra nods along her sleeve, borrows his terminology:

“I get it, Gabe.” The tower grows in front of them, gaining fish-like plates of detail. “Weird she could fix the error so quickly for us, but not for you, huh?” Reaper lowers his head.

“I got her a better sample. Later series. Back then, I had to know…”

“So, there’s nothing wrong with Morrison?”

“There’s a lot wrong with him!” Reaper’s claws tear into his own legs.

She should have known better than to ask.

Reaper moors the skiff in the shade of a milky pillar and clambers off the water onto the lowest step of the tower. Drones condense from the afternoon haze and worm after his head. He gives Sombra a chance, hefting her onto his shoulder so she can spread her hands over their pink eyes.

But they no longer listen to her.

When the drones prove unaggressive he lets them flag along after his coat. They disperse on their own as he surfaces into the gauzy orange gardens. He crosses empty classroom windows, drags through quiet courtyards. Sombra remains invisible, though it no longer protects her. It was her the drones were staring at when they arrived. Her outline fizzes at the points of contact with Reaper’s claws and armor. She’s a distortion in his slow-moving shadow that creeps over flowers and colored flags.

As he nears the Ministry of Genetics he drops to a crouch behind a terrace ledge. Moments later Sombra hears it too: sprinting sandals, a figure dashing up the central walkway far from their own secretive route. The silhouette flows out of green leaves thirty meters away. Reaper presses lower under the polygonal sequences of a garden lattice. Sombra’s ankle grinds into a decorative canal. Touching the earth and flowers doesn’t hurt so much when she has something to look at.

Long legs in blue pants, a clipped white blouse, and brown hair mummified in a professional bun. Sombra scrapes dried blood from her eyes so she can see more. She knows this woman better when she wears nothing but feathers.

Inside her there’s an absurd urge: stick her hand up, yell, let the stranger know she exists.

But she doesn’t move.

“If you like her, stay quiet,” Reaper rattles anyway, inside her head, her voice of conscience. Sombra crosses her arms as they watch the woman ring the doorbell on the closed Ministry gate.

“Figures.” Sombra’s nails cut at the skin under her sleeve. “The only person I didn’t check, and she’s one of Moira’s.”

“It’s not that simple. Look, Moira doesn’t want to see her.” He’s right. The gate stays shut, and after a few more doorbell presses the woman paces back listlessly, her eyes shining. “Though you shouldn’t have lapsed like that. Just because someone smiles at you, it doesn’t mean they’re your friend.”

“I wonder what she’s looking for.” Sombra watches the woman tug her phone out from a tight pocket and check the screen.

A single security bot sheds its cloak over the woman’s head. Its body shades in, helixing around the Ministry building multiple times. Some of the red eyes rainbowing across its hammer-shaped face are as tall as the visiting stranger. Translucent glide panels flick at its sides. Guttural sonar blips from its long belly as dozens of armored fingers unfurl beneath its head and spread on the walkway.

The woman taps at the armlet under her short white sleeve and projects an ID hologram for the machine to scan. The eyes all over its crimson chains wink out of rhythm with each other. She shows it her phone and weeps something Sombra can’t hear. Reaper’s heartbeat speeds up against her shoulder.

The bot hefts its glide panels and discharges a couple drones curled around themselves like oily scampi. As they hatch out and start floating their parent pivots its head to each one in turn, syncing with fluxes of blood-colored light. The drones swim away from the lab, beckoning the woman to follow with dovey flaps of their tails. The woman covers her mouth, staring at her phone screen as they escort her to the tower.

With a wind tunnel sigh the serpent noosed around the Ministry lays back to the plaster and disappears.

Sombra notches her hand on Reaper’s hood and straightens over him as he walks towards the closed door. She watches the other woman vanish beneath the tower shadow.

“It’s almost dinnertime,” she mutters as Reaper applies the flat of his claw to the doorbell. “It’s possible Moira went out somewhere for the holiday, right?” A judder shocks through Reaper’s arm as he retracts. In the ensuing silence he stares at the prophet in his arms. She blinks back hopelessly, pudging out her lower lip.

The Ministry gate slides open without anyone on the other side. Reaper clears his throat and proceeds inside.

Blue light makes iridescent passes across Reaper’s old leather coat. Endless marches of diamonds and shadows on the ceiling leave Sombra feeling hazy. She tests the back of her glove against her forehead. She can’t separate her own temperature from that of the desert. Her ankle doesn’t hurt so much anymore, but her processors keep telling her the leg is infected, that it doesn’t belong. That the nausea might go if she lets Reaper eat it. She steadies her breathing, like he taught her, and the doors to Moira’s private facilities slink apart.

They don’t spot the Minister in the central lab, even with the walls an opaque white that anybody would print against like a slide stain. Reaper sniffs and prowls to a side door. It opens wide to a dark, coiling hallway.

Guide lights shuttle to life along the edges of the floor as Reaper advances. The walls blow up with blue backlights, surfaces glass, tiny fish and nanomechanical anemones playing behind the invisible boundary. The corridor candles up a golden spiral from the reef on the right, saltwater wrapping across the ceiling and dumping silent waterfalls into the brackish terrariums on the left. Frogs, newts, and other semi-fishy creatures make their first steps onto land, progressing to beetles and giant amoebae as Reaper nears the coral-colored door panel at the far end.

Sombra waits for one of the icy see-through rays or hooknail-jawed anglerfish to plummet into the terraria, but it never happens. The next door breathes open. The apartment on the other side is benign peach plaster with hollow wooden arabesque molds dividing the kitchenette they enter from the living room ahead.

Moira sits on one side of an otherwise empty couch in lavender flannel pajamas, a conservatively sized monitor shining on the wall across from her. Sombra recognizes the program playing. She knows the words coming out of the protagonist’s mouth by heart, even if she remembers him dubbed in English and right now he’s speaking Japanese, with Irish subtitles. The scene sets up: he discovers one of his reindeer allies is injured, so it might not be able to pull the sleigh and deliver presents to good girls and boys. The hero, transformed into a black deer himself, bows his velvet nose to his friend’s body. Little teardrops squeeze from his round brown eyes and dampen the holly green bow around his neck. The bright colors make Sombra’s head hurt.

“Hola, titi,” she scratches out, wagging her hand, stroking at her throat with the other.

The Minister looks over her shoulder, mismatched eyes full of tears, more of them sweating down her cheekbones. Reaper glances between her expression and the cartoon on the monitor.

_“Ugh.”_

Moira’s hand rises in greeting, a pearly phone lit up under her fingers.

“Get some Christmas wishes?” Sombra lifts her chin at the phone. Moira blinks at the device, then echoes the cheer with a colorless press of her lips.

“From a colleague of mine. It’s been assured that we can continue working together.”

“Good to hear.” On the monitor the hero revives his friend with unspecified holiday magicks. They knock a couple bottles of Yakult into bowls to refresh themselves before their important mission. Sombra makes conversational wheels of her hands. “So listen, I was wondering…” She submerges into a cough.

Moira’s eyes pan back over her, stopping at her rumpled collar, then reviewing her leg. A pause chevron blinks over the two deer. Moira ascends from the couch, more than doubling her extravagant height. Another color to her person reveals itself in her other hand: a tall glass of something tan and bubbling. “Ooh, what’s that?” Sombra piques back out of her shattered throat.

Moira comes around the side of the couch. White rabbit slippers pat the carpet, her bare ankles sticking from her insufficient pajama cuffs. A purple nail leans at Sombra’s nose.

“You do seem to have swallowed a bit of the sand we have in abundance here.”

“Something like that.” Sombra tugs down the jacket collar and shows her.

“Mm…” Moira inserts her nail through the layers, pulling the soaked fabric apart. She withdraws and approaches the kitchen counter, laying down her phone and half-empty glass. She pulls an identical cup from the cupboard and pours out fresh coffee from a processor. Reaper takes a few shallow sniffs as Moira jots in additions from other bottles around the countertop. She collars the finished drink with whipped cream and brings it over to Sombra.

Sombra has to use both hands to collect the warm glass. The coffee has an alcoholic bite under its foam, and a white mustache draws across her lip as her mouth pops wide in joy. She jams the glass at Reaper’s nose. His head recoils.

“Just try it!” Sombra lowers the glass back to her own torso and sips discretely. “You can smell it right? It’s really good…”

“He’s picky,” Moira teases. “You have to encourage him with something he really likes before he’ll try anything new.” Sombra’s mustached smile droops as Moira steps over to her refrigerator and opens the freezer.

Moira pulls out a plate of chocolate chip cookies. Sombra hiccups. Reaper’s eyes simmer behind his mask at her. Moira sets the plate in the stomach of the processor and tabs the _REHEAT _button. After a few seconds she retrieves the plate and carries it over. “If you would, Reaper,” she beckons. Reaper shoves his arms out straight and her slender hands meet his underneath Sombra. They part, leaving Sombra in the Minister’s care and the plate of cookies in Reaper’s claws.

Despite the relative scrawniness of Moira’s arms, she holds Sombra’s body aloft as easily as the old Soldier before her. “Technically I am not a physician. But these injuries appear simple enough to negotiate.” Sombra’s eyes dart between Reaper’s mask and the steaming cookies.

Reaper abandons the cookie plate on the counter the moment Moira turns to the door. He follows her through the oceanic bridge to the lab facilities. Sombra nurses the remains of her coffee as they parade through another door to a smaller lab ringed in high shelves and neat RGB arrays of chemicals. At the end of the room, an operating table lodges under a window to a filtered turquoise sunset. Reaper remains by the doorframe in a slice of shade, gray-skinned arms crossing over his chest.

Moira plucks the coffee away when Sombra tries to drain the cream. Sombra wriggles as the operating table hisses and cracks-- but looking, she sees only a fresh blue bedcloth shrink-wrapping the top. Moira lays her on the table, flattening a hand to each bump of her knees so that she stretches her legs out, the broken next to the whole. Retreating to the potion shelves, Moira tugs down a packet of blue juices wide enough to cover her ribs.

“Can’t you just use your cable tech?” Sombra murmurs.

“Now, now.” Moira sets the glowing packet on the table. She slides on a couple pink gloves. “Why go for the same old solution when we could try something new?” She plugs an applicator the size of a turkey baster through a port in the packet. As she draws back the plunger she taps the coded information printed down the side. “Or at least, something nearing its expiry date unused. Try to avoid movement now, dear. Waste not.”

Sombra unzips the collar layers and Moira glues a few worms of blue sludge around her throat. The instant the liquid makes contact Sombra’s skin floods with cold, minty relief. She swallows repeatedly, head clunking down on the disinfected sheet. Moira locates the finger-shaped divots on the other side with a rubber caress. She calls a chronometer off her wrist.

They wait together, one minute. “Has relief descended past the topical layer?” Moira asks. Sombra bobs her chin. Her whole neck is numb. “Excellent.” Moira uses a virtual tape measure to record something on the right side before blotting the remainder of the bruises out with her magical blue gel.

“Did you make this stuff for Gabe?”

Reaper remains an unimpressed statue by the door, aside from a tightening of his fingers against the inside of his bared triceps. Moira’s eyebrows go up, but settle before she speaks.

“This compound was a late-stage prototype developed by certain illustrious minds at Overwatch. A final gift to the world, though I expect official records on it have been lost.” Moira scooches down the table to the angry purple-red blob tearing out of Sombra’s leg. Her nails wisp over Sombra's bones, leaving trails of slime. The excavation of the ankle wound hurts more despite being so much further from her brain. Moira’s hands are hammers. But Sombra holds in place, quivering, and in time Moira pulls away, leaving only ice and mint.

Moira summons the chrono and posts it in the air over Sombra where it can tick down like a bomb. “Let’s give this five minutes to set, then we’ll turn you over and make sure there isn’t anything we missed. I’ll make you another coffee.”

“Keep ‘em comin’,” Sombra grins.

Reaper glides out of Moira’s way when she comes back down the aisle. She snaps off her gloves and tosses them in a yellow disposal unit, and he follows after her when she leaves. The closing door consumes them both.

Sombra touches her neck. Her skin is soft and dry. The numbness dissipates. Just a bit of frost comes out when she breathes. It’s kind of a shame to zip herself back under the wrinkled, red-spattered nanofiber, but her implants ache too much for laundry. She sits up and looks out the window across the lake of Oasis.

An almost perfect mole blots the upper corner of the window pane. Sombra taps at the blemish. It fuzzes at the fringes, splits in quake lines to its center, and shakes apart into iridescent components, wings and spindly hair-like tails. The cloud of mayflies takes off into the cloudless sky, only for a red drone shaped like a dove to flash past and incinerate them with a laser from its segmented abdomen. It circles back to snip the motes of ash and dismembered wings out of the air.

At the other end of the lab the door snicks open. Moira is grinning over her shoulder at Reaper, and uplifts two coffee glasses when she notices Sombra looking. The timer ticks down to zero as she approaches. She sets the glasses to the tabletop and crooks forward to inspect Sombra’s ankle.

“Think you got it.” Sombra lifts her legs over the side of the table, swinging them a couple times before she hops down. She demonstrates with a twirl on her formerly disfigured foot, swiping up one of the coffee handles with her windmill arm.

“Can you go en pointe?” Moira chuckles, gathering her own glass.

“On what?” Sombra tapers her brows together. Reaper, lingering no closer than the door again, turns and leaves on his own.

“Do tell Amélie I said hello,” Moira calls after him. Sombra can hear from the cataclysm of his boots that he’s withdrawing to the courtyard.

“Thanks,” she smirks as she and Moira sip their coffees. Sombra drinks down half, taking her time, but when she checks, Moira’s glass is emptied to the same level.

“Does something remain amiss?” Moira asks, cool and soft like an inoculation against the sunlight streaming through the laboratory.

“That show you were watching.” Moira’s red eyebrows hike up her pale face, eyes fixed on Sombra without blinking. The tear trails are still shimmering on her cheeks. “Itsuki’s Holiday Adventure, right? It’s kind of a little kid cartoon. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty cute…was just surprised to see you bothering with it,” Sombra mumbles over the foamy rim of her glass.

Moira smiles over the rim of hers.

“It has an interesting history. Children’s programming from the Crisis years remains some of humankind’s most elusive content. Itsuki was one of the only holiday programs produced, and certain minds have argued that its existence demonstrates Japan’s relative isolation from the Crisis.” Moira pauses to drain her glass. “But more recently a series of long-term studies have examined the psychological effects of the program.”

“Propaganda from a holiday special?” Sombra nods and shrugs at the same time.

“During the Crisis many parts of the world lost Net infrastructure for long periods of time, so institutions of lesser means ended up broadcasting nothing but Itsuki for their children for months on end. For the Crisis generation, what was meant to be a one-time dose of product placements and corporate messaging became a bible.” Moira’s smile shines from her face. The pink eyes of her rabbit slippers stare at Sombra. The fur on the slipper tops looks real. “It’s a true classic.”

Sombra finishes her coffee.

“I think this is really the best thing I’ve had while I’ve been here.” She joins the empty glass to Moira’s on the counter beside a chemical cleanser basin. Cream suds web between the cups.

“It’s the Kọfị Aromo I think. It pairs quite well with the water of life.” Moira winks at her.

Sombra fishes at her coat pocket and pulls out a plastic baggie spotted with lake water and instant ice. She sticks her laden arm out at Moira. “Oh…” Moira’s throat trembles, her coffee-heated hands wrapping around Sombra’s to relieve her of the fishy burden. She opens the bag and pries free a misty white eyeball.

When Sombra picked the eye up it had been just the sphere, but now she notices a thick white pasta slopping off the back, edges sprouting hairy capillaries and pink fingerlings of muscle. “You shouldn’t have,” Moira gushes, hanging the specimen in front of her face, one of her eyes briefly replaced by the milky blob. “I regret that I had no idea you would be visiting, or I would have obtained a favor for you as well.”

“It’s fine. This’ll help Gabe, right?”

The red eye that Sombra can still see winches off the specimen and down at her.

“This is a great contribution to science.” Moira peels bits of ice off the organ and pulls out the racks of an incubator unit on the counter. She loads the eye into a tray. “Was Gabriel involved in liberating this particular specimen?”

“Not really.” Sombra takes the pink sanitizer bottle from her pocket and squirts it onto her glove, rubbing into the nanofiber. “It was a grenade.”

“_Very_ good. Explains this scorch mark on the anterior as well.”

“I kind of fell while I had it on me. That might be why there’s…” Sombra wags her fingers at the glop escaping the back of the vitreum. “…_stuff _sticking out of it now.”

“That would be the optic nerve.” Moira closes the lid on the incubator. The specimen tray rocks gently while the thermometer on the side ticks upwards.

“Oh.” Sombra’s cheeks heat through. “It’s so big.”

“It runs through the entire brain.” Moira uses holographic dials on the incubator lid to adjust the atmosphere inside. Her arms fold behind her back, force of habit. “I truly must thank you for this thoughtful gift. Will you be staying? It might be useful to your personal health if our security forces were to recognize you as a valid guest.”

“Ha, those machines? They need some updating.” Sombra crosses her arms. She glances at the unlit vines of her hands clutching her dirty elbows. “I don’t think so. I don’t really like this place as much as I thought I would.”

Moira cleans the operating table, staring out the window at the water.

“I have never thought that I need to like my home. Only that it be a place where I can work unimpeded.” Her smile slides over a tall shoulder. “All the greatest minds in the world have gathered here. Surely you are one of those.” Sombra finds herself smiling too. Moira tempts her with a pale finger pointing to the galaxies above, “I’ll show you my other laboratory. At the top of the tower.”

“The tower that isn’t finished yet?” Sombra snorts. Moira’s mouth opens, fish-like, then she calls a hologram vista of the thing across the window glass with a few taps at the UI in the corner. She blinks at the jagged spire blotting out the sun like she hasn’t seen it before.

“It does appear broken, doesn’t it?” she rumbles softly. One corner of Sombra’s mouth works up. Moira cups her hands in front of her stomach, reviewing the figure over and over again. “What if I told you that the design is such that it only works if it’s broken? That were we to complete it, it would simply fall apart?”

“Sounds like a bad foundation.”

“And we have endeavored so long to repair its nature, because our minds can only perceive what it is missing. I have come to believe we may only see it as broken because we are unable to stand at the peak with it as yet.” The nails of Moira’s plain hand feather across her purple one. “The first time we witness the tree of life, we don’t know what we are looking at.”

“You’d rather gain an understanding of the process than fix it?”

The Minister turns, outlined in gold, the tower spire projecting from her head. Her hair resembles a warm torch overcoming the tower’s base.

“You have some interest in such mysteries too, don’t you? That is why you belong here. And why you must keep pushing Gabriel.”

Sombra elbows herself straight up from her lean on the counter next to the ticking incubator.

“Huh?”

Moira’s eyes are blue and red on her beneath pasty eyelids.

“Gabriel is very creative.” Her head tilts out of its silhouette against the desert fire. “I suspect he has begun to experiment with his own nature. There have been certain changes in his make-up, but he insists to me that nothing is different.” Sombra is wondering if she has ever seen Moira frown before. “I almost feel that he is taunting me. …he must have more wonders to show us. Have you noticed anything in the field?”

Sombra shakes her head.

“He comes all the way out here for your help. I’m sure he would tell you everything he knows.”

The staples of Moira’s elegant frown dissolve, expression dwindling to a bitter bone between her cheeks.

“Some things people do because they believe in them,” she says. “Some they do because it is what they are supposed to care about. A reflex action, you might say. At one time we were so close to achieving the most mundane expectation…and then something unfortunate happened. My fear is that after so many times being told there is no answer yet, he will stop trying. He may have developed some trust issues with me.”

“Come on, titi!” Sombra chides, sidling onto her toes to get her arms around the other woman. Moira’s eyes wake up at the hug and she stands still like an electrocuted goose. Sombra mushes her cheek into the charming flannel. “He’s like that with everybody! He made a career out of trust issues. But even if he doesn’t get it, I know you are looking out for him.” Surprise relieved, Moira tousles a hand on Sombra’s shave lines. Sombra flinches. She doesn’t see the Minister’s mouth scoop up in a wide, thin smirk.

“I am still working on it,” Moira allows. “This home of mine has taught me the strength of working with others. As in the matter of our tower, we must gain more eyes to look over the problem so that there might be one who sees the truth.” Her nails brush at her pajama pocket. At her phone, Sombra thinks. “Then we can ascend our understanding together.” Moira sighs, rippling her hands over Sombra’s shoulders and propping her back. Sombra watches the long fingers divot her jacket fabric. “We have yet to establish a Ministry devoted exclusively to technology, to the Network…”

Sombra thrashes her head, laughing.

“Sorry!” She shrugs. The hologram of the tower fades from the window behind Moira, leaving only the sunlight of another day. “Right now it’s not really my style.” Sombra ducks out from under the Minister’s hands. “Still got a couple things I want to figure out before it’s too late.”

“Of course,” Moira hums through the chemical racks after her. Sombra heads to the door so she can track Reaper down before he crawls too far ahead, or worse, abandons her in paradise. “The planet is a worthy laboratory,” Moira echoes. “But if pursuit of knowledge is your desire, know that you need only ask.”


	7. EPILOGUE: A Holiday for Mayflies

A wingless skiff glides across the lake of eyes and a winged shuttle departs the sideways smile of the moon to join it. Black bodies meet atop green waters. Blinded drones crack off the hull of the descending Talon shuttle, swirling dizzy in the red heat of the thruster jets. Centipedal steelwork ejects from the side of the crooked bird, dipping to the water beside the ashen boat.

Reaper gets a leg over the Masî’s rail and thunders up the shuttle ramp. Widowmaker waits in the open door, compressed rifle ready in her hand, yellow eyes reflecting the Masî’s hoverjets as it slowly spins away. Reaper snares his talons in the doorframe as he reaches the top of the ramp. His mask faces Widowmaker, but she isn’t looking at him. She is staring into the starless water. He lets go of the frame and steps inside.

The helmet of the pilot in the shuttle’s nose box swivels one-eighty degrees. Red indicator lights roll on and off rapidly beneath a star-shaped crack in the faded helmet glass.

“Hey boss!” The pilot’s arms jam upwards in the obsidian sleeves of a bomber jacket. The greeting jiggles of its hands crunch into fists and a yawn vibrates out of its synthesizer.

“Why are you yawning?” Reaper snaps. “You don’t sleep.”

“When we did prep on Big Ben I spent a while watching the cult speeches,” the pilot thinks aloud, dropping its arms to the padded, ergonomic crescents framing its glossy chair. “The madman said I could practice and learn how.” Its sterno-bars grind into its jacket collar as it looks down at its face reflecting on the console buttons. “But isn’t yawning also indicative of boredom?”

“You’re bored?” Reaper lumbers to one of the passenger wells and takes a seat on the thin flight cushions, coattails drooping behind the heavy, awkward bends of his armored legs.

“The lady isn’t always a conversationalist.” The pilot’s hands subdivide into a thicket of manipulators that wind over the console switchboard. The ramp retracts and the shuttle grinds away from the water simultaneously.

“You going to let him talk about you like that?” Reaper chuckles at Widowmaker.

“Does it matter?” Her blue palm flashes up as the bay doors start to close. The titanium panels freeze, the gap between them whistling as the shuttle flaps to the upper atmosphere. Oxygen flows out of the passenger bay. “Sombra was with you?” Two of Widowmaker’s fingers lift to the activator on the side of her thermal visor.

“We are a little over expected carriage,” the pilot corroborates in its pleasantly oiled tones.

“It’s me,” Reaper mutters. “Ignore it.”

“Gotcha.” The bay doors snip shut.

Widowmaker rests her hand, brows penciling low across her eyes. The note clears before she turns to Reaper.

“Did you have an opportunity to visit this year?” he growls.

“Non.” She disarms her rifle and hitches it into the rack beside the door. When she takes her seat it is two passenger wells down from Reaper. One leg crosses over the other, one careful space is left between the two of them. “Akande had a mission.”

“You were successful?”

“Of course.”

“Good.” Reaper hunches forward, claws hanging in empty massacres off his kneecaps.

“Where do we head now boss?” The pilot opens a hologram across one pane of the windshield, the entire world at its fingertips. “L.A.?”

“It’s past time.”

“Right! The holiday. So…”

Reaper looks to Widowmaker.

“Château Guillard,” she orders. “There isn’t a location where we hold greater value at the moment.”

“Interested to see what you’ve done with the place,” Reaper rattles softly. Widowmaker’s eyes cut over his stump in the seat.

“Where is the fly?”

“She said she would stay a while.” His claws curl. “Go shopping…” His mask rises from the glare he’s giving his knees. He glances around the sterling silver-black of the passenger bay. “Increase the oxygen,” he rasps at the pilot.

“Oh yeah, we lost a bit of our cabin pressure with that door delay.” The pilot reaches over its head and twists a dial. The shuttle ventilation coughs down from the austere steel ribs of the ceiling. “That’s probably uncomfortable--”

“Shut up.” Reaper rises out of his passenger well. He paces out to the middle of the ship and hangs in the cross-currents.

His mask turns at the pilot box. He climbs the stairs, fingers twitching and gnarling as his sinister hand drifts out ahead of the rest of him.

His claws lock over air just behind the pilot’s chair.

The purple skeleton of a woman stands behind the pilot, hands on hips. The brown of her skin frescos over the outline, painting a smirk at Reaper.

“Thought maybe you’d forgotten that conversation when you got your head blown off.” Sombra dips her shoulder out from under his fingers and circles the pilot’s cushy chair. Her hand flattens on the switchboard. The pilot’s segmented fingers freeze beside her. “You’re lucky,” she tells it. The pilot’s head creaks at Reaper. Reaper hefts the pointy chin of his mask.

“I am?” the pilot asks, Sombra’s eyes reflecting on its bullet-stained helmet.

“Yeah.” She rubs the exposed metal plate on the back of her neck. “Though I still might kidnap you later and check out all the secrets you’re holding.”

“Well, I’m honored.” The pilot’s black branches snap back into humanoid hands. It points at her. “You decided it would be kidnapping, and not theft.” Sombra’s grin peters out. The shuttle rocks. “Oops-- hold on a second. Bit of turbulence where the desert hits the mountains here.” The pilot turns its back on her, showing a neck of knobby vertebral hexes filing loosely over deep red cables.

“You should take her seriously,” Reaper offers dryly. “She’s Death to you.”

“Really?” The pilot levels the shuttle, glances at Sombra. “Doesn’t look all that scary.” Sombra’s mouth drops open. She finds herself glaring at Reaper. The red bores in the eyeholes of his mask burn back at her for a few seconds.

“Guess you’ll have to live with it.”

The pilot steers a couple exterior camera feeds onto the left and right panes of the windshield, leaving the open sky in the center. Sombra closes her lips as she notices, for the first time in a while, stars unfurling clear across the universe above. The pilot ticks the _AUTO_ switch and opens a bin hidden under the console, gathering out a clipboard, a paper crossword puzzle, and a marker. Sombra taps her nails on the console. Reaper’s shadow hovers curiously at her back. She flashes her muted, unlit blue glove at the pilot.

“Can’t you just network with this other machine?”

The pilot’s signal array scribbles up and down beneath the bubble of its helmet. It uses the marker to tap the side of its head.

“He, um, removed my connection to the Net. When I met him.” Its gray iron face shifts at Reaper. “I don’t really miss it, to be honest.”

“You really shouldn’t go around picking up everything you find on the street,” Sombra frowns at the meddling ghost.

“No?” Reaper glowers at her. “But they end up so very loyal. You didn’t notice him on the way here, did you?” His laughter coils out at her. “How many flights have you taken and you’ve been blind to him?”

“Well it didn’t _talk _before,” Sombra snarls.

“Because I told him not to when you’re on board.” Reaper leaves them, thudding down the steps to the passenger bay. “Leave him alone, Sombra. I need him for later.”

The pilot isn’t paying attention to her. It’s trying to figure out a vertical seven-letter word for a first impression. Its marker doodles a mindless illiterate blot at the topmost letter box, and it’s not the first such stain. She grips the husk of the chair and leans over the pilot’s shoulder, reviewing the pattern of the puzzle. The pilot turns to her, the slots ventilating its face and the thick red LED slugs winding up its cheeks staring blankly. The gaps down its jawbone create an illusion of skeletal teeth. Sombra points at the problem column.

_“Imprint.”_

“Ha!” Lights dancing afire, the pilot writes the word in. It has airy handwriting, three-dimensional sometimes, like it thinks each letter is a portrait. “Thanks, Sombra!”

She massages down the back of her collar again as she descends the stairs to the passenger bay. Even though Widowmaker is flying with them this isn’t one of Maximilien’s ships, which is a shame. She would have liked a shower.

Widowmaker plucks her old music player with a melted corner from a storage bin under her seat, and retrieves a couple ear buds off the back. The player style is dated, with blue cords stretching off the buds and a connector piece she must plug into the jack on top. She hitches one bud in her bloodless ear and offers Reaper the other.

“Did Moira send you something?” He swipes the bud off her palm. Sombra watches him fold it under one side of his hood.

“I bought it at a solar station.” Widowmaker taps play, and a web of pink veins bubble up in the whorl of her ear. The blue cord sags between the two of them and Sombra detects spindly electric strings, a wordless energy that grows and writhes. Reaper sighs.

“I remember when you performed to this.”

Widowmaker’s fingers curl on the tops of her thighs. She glances at Sombra diagramming herself into the seat between the two of them and her lips contract like she’s bit a lemon.

“A château, huh?” Sombra grins. Widowmaker turns away from her and absently pulls the passenger well’s safety straps over her shoulder. Sombra keens her arms over her head, teeth sliding back behind her dark lips. “What’s wrong? Was there something the two of you were going to get up to if you thought nobody else was there?”

Widowmaker exhales out her nose, and Sombra finally gets her cold golden eyes.

“I was just hoping you would not break anything while you are there,” Widow sneers. “In fact it might be better if you did not leave the ship.”

Sombra knows how the rhythm of this conversation is supposed to go. Widowmaker’s face tightens, icy around the corners of her mouth, waiting for her.

Sombra extends her hand at the ear bud cords fountaining off the music player.

“Got another one?”

Widowmaker’s unchanging pupils switch off Sombra to the player. Her hand tightens around the player box and she shakes her head, long hair echoing all the way down to her toes. Sombra lays back in the passenger well and drags her _ay_ to the ceiling. The line between Widowmaker and Reaper prickles against her back. She crosses her legs like Widow, but her toes kick to a barely discernible beat. Widowmaker stares at the jiggle in her outline.

“Take his,” she instructs. “He doesn’t need it anymore.” Sombra blinks over at Reaper.

Reaper statues on the narrow seat with his arms crossed, mask fixed at the far wall. Red lights cobweb through the mask sockets and down the nose, all semblance to eyes or other human structures lost in the dark. The seam in his neck has crumpled to a visible gap between the torch of smoke behind the mask and his body, which doesn’t move to acknowledge Sombra, which doesn’t even breathe.

She gets out of her seat and pokes him dead between the bolts on his forehead. The mask rocks backwards on her fingertip, smoke flushing out around the edges. Like solar flares the threads of black fog curve back into the nucleus of his head. Sombra skips away to the nose of the ship and pokes her glove at the pilot.

“Gimme.”

Its-- his shielded head unit bobbles up from the crossword paper. He caps his marker and drops it into her hand. She jogs back down to the passenger bay and huddles before Reaper.

Widowmaker watches Sombra scrawl across Reaper’s forehead. The subject of the sentence Sombra sketches around the nose gap, making curly, joining flourishes on the letters so that the finished product resembles a mustache.

_I _<3

_OVERWATCH_

Masterpiece complete, she reclaims her throne between the two of them. She leans back, a short imitation of the man on her right. She lets him keep his music. “Think he’ll notice right away?” she laughs at Widow.

“Probably not,” Widowmaker responds in monotone. “There are few mirrors in the Château these days.”

A few minutes later the pilot inches down from his box and reaches for the marker tucked beneath Sombra’s crossed arms. He tweezes a couple fingers around the marker cap and tugs once, twice, then relieves her of the implement. His fists go up over his head before he pulls the marker down close to his chassis.

“I got it back from Death,” he coos at himself, signal lights winking poinsettia. He pivots back to his box.

“Wait,” Widowmaker murmurs, sitting up and detaching her ear bud.

“Of course.”

She takes the marker from him and draws off the cap. Bending down on her long legs, she sketches an imitation of Reaper’s mustache across Sombra’s upper lip. Hers has no letters imprinted through the ink, just fiendish curls. Widowmaker returns the marker when she’s done and takes her seat.

Sombra sleeps with a gentle dream.

They are, all of them at Talon, the very best of friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Twitter: [@Bible_Salesman](https://twitter.com/Bible_Salesman) / Tumblr: [@thebiblesalesman](https://thebiblesalesman.tumblr.com/)  
Playlist: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7JVBXZnjYPA2Svow3hxLik)  
Bonus Track: [Goodbye to a World - Porter Robinson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2TE0DjdNqI)
> 
> Inspirations:  

> 
>   * [The first 15 seconds](https://imgur.com/tpoE60E) of [Introducing Moira](https://youtu.be/8tLopqeL9s8)
>   * [Sombra - Early Ideation](https://imgur.com/GVuy6tn) from _The Art of Overwatch_
>   * *dumps every known Sombra and Reaper interaction* Okay, but especially:  
[on Oasis] [SOMBRA]: So what are we doing here, boss?  
[REAPER]: I need to pay a visit to a friend.
>   * Lots of sequences from [Do the Evolution by Pearl Jam](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI) but especially [this one](https://imgur.com/6srfjIy) \- if the animation looks familiar, the video was co-directed by Kevin Altieri (who also co-directed on _Batman: The Animated Series_) and Todd McFarlane, creator of _Spawn_


End file.
